One of the quiet traps in litigation is assuming the other side knows your client the way you do.
They almost never do.
This trap appears most often with lawyers representing plaintiffs in personal injury litigation.
A plaintiff’s lawyer spends months — sometimes years — with their client.
Conferences, phone calls, review of medical records, drafting statements of particulars.
Over time, a detailed picture forms: the person’s motivations, fears, personality, credibility.
But the other side doesn’t see that picture.
They see a file.
You see a person.
As Morgan Housel once observed, “All behaviour always makes sense with enough information “. The problem is that most people never have enough.
Litigation amplifies that problem.
A plaintiff’s lawyer may know their client as thoughtful, credible, and resilient.
The defendant may see the same person as exaggerated, unreliable, or opportunistic.
Neither view is necessarily irrational — and that’s the point. Both sides can be entirely reasonable while operating from completely different pictures of the same human being.
Once each side builds a narrative around their information, it becomes remarkably hard to see beyond it.
This is where mediation comes in.
A well-run mediation gives parties something litigation rarely provides: direct exposure to the human reality behind the case.
When people hear a story told in the first person rather than through affidavits and submissions, something shifts.
The file becomes a person.
That doesn’t mean everyone suddenly agrees. But it removes one of the biggest hidden drivers of impasse — the assumption that the other side already understands what you understand.
They don’t. And they can’t.
Mediation works, in part, because it helps close that gap. Not by forcing agreement. But by making sure everyone is at least looking at the same human being.
Many disputes are not driven by different facts. They are driven by different pictures of the same person.
