Having advocated in scores of mediations as an aviation defense lawyer and sat in the middle chair as a neutral for cases of all sizes and shapes, I thought I would toss my aviator hat into the ring and present a pre-mediation checklist for your consideration. After all, pilots love checklists.
But first a few preliminaries: For starters, what exactly is an aviation case? At any given time, firms that specialize in aviation law might have cases as mundane as lost baggage or damaged or missing cargo; slip and falls on all manner of hazards in the terminal; and airline onboard incidents involving spilled hot beverages, runaway beverage carts, and articles seeming to eject themselves from overhead bins onto the hapless passenger below. Sexy, right? Not every “aviation case” is one that fires the imagination.