testimonials

“Justice Mihara successfully mediated an employment dispute. His pre-mediation Zoom meeting was particularly helpful. We had a really thoughtful conversation about the different parties’ perspectives and Justice Mihara put himself in the respective parties’ shoes and gave me his impressions. We get so entrenched in our own party’s perspective that sometimes it’s instructive to take a step back and to think about it from a different angle.”

“I used Justice Mihara as an arbitrator in a case that settled before it got to a hearing. He made a ruling on a sensitive discovery issue, and that ended up sparking settlement in the dispute. What you often see in arbitration is you have these arbitrators who split the baby and give a little bit to this side and a little bit to that side, but Justice Mihara actually took a stance and said, ‘Ok, one side is right here.’ And I really appreciated that he took the time and actually made a decision instead of kicking the can down the road and saying, ‘I’ll give you a little bit here. I’ll give the other side a little bit here.’”

“I appeared a couple of times before Justice Mihara at the 6th District Court of Appeal and recall one case in which he ruled against me. The ideal oral argument for an appellate lawyer is a conversation. It’s not an argument. It’s not a presentation. It’s a dialogue, and I recall that’s the kind of exchange we had. He ruled against me, and he was giving me a rough time, but he wasn’t unpleasant. He was just pushing me the way any justice should when they’re skeptical about your position. I used him for argument preparation as part of a moot court panel made up of three former appeals justices from ADR Services, Inc. He brought that same brand of professional and courteous judicial temperament to those moot court proceedings. He got into the case, he understood it, he asked good questions, he grabbed onto the issues and the difficulties. It was a very productive moot court, in part, because of his questioning.”