Peace Award Recipient: John Sarratt

By Frank Laney

Many mediators describe themselves as reformed litigators – lawyers who have spent decades in the litigation trenches, fighting court battles for their clients. Then, at some point in their career, they have an epiphany – they realize that there is a better way to get their clients to where the client wants to be – past this dispute. It is the rare client who comes to a lawyer asking for as much total war as the lawyer can muster within the rules of court procedure. Instead, what the client wants is a resolution to a conflict. They want their problem solved.

John Sarratt, our Peace Award recipient for 2022, is just such a lawyer. He spent 50 years engaged in commercial litigation with some of the biggest law firms in our state – Brooks Pierce, Petree Stockton, Kennedy Covington. Then he had an epiphany. Many times, his client did not want a fight; they wanted a resolution. And the trial courts were not necessarily the best place for that to occur. He had run into a sort of mediation hybrid process called Collaborative Law – a process where each party is still represented by an attorney, but the attorneys are trained in collaborative, cooperative problem solving. The parties and their attorneys all commit to a collaborative process and work hard to reach a resolution that makes sense for all the parties.

When John realized that Collaborative Law was his next adventure in the law, he jumped in with both hands and feet. He brought his idea of expanding Collaborative Law from family disputes and applying the same principles to business and commercial disputes to the Dispute Resolution Section. In 2014 he was appointed chair of a brand-new committee to pursue the idea. He then founded the non-profit North Carolina Civil Collaborative Law Association. He joined the Global Collaborative Law Council (and is its past president). He has led eight training sessions to prepare NC lawyers to conduct civil collaborative law processes. Now he is teaching civil collaborative law at Wake Forest University School of Law and Campbell Law School. Probably his crowning achievement in developing this area of dispute resolution began with his appearance before the General Statutes Commission in 2016. He worked broadly to get a uniform collaborative law act drafted based upon North Carolina practice and principles. He shepherded the resulting bill through three sessions of the legislature, until it was finally passed and signed by the governor on July 1, 2020.

So, for his enthusiastic leadership and tireless work on developing and bringing Civil Collaborative Law to our state, I am pleased to give this Peace Award to John Sarratt.