Metro Apartment Manager, July 2006

Q: I gave my tenants a 30-day no-cause termination notice but they say they’re going to fight it. So it looks like I will have to evict them. Can you tell me what to expect?

A: Yikes. Isn’t this the same question we dealt with last month? Well, yes it is. And we said we’d talk a bit about negotiated settlements.

Oregon courts (and others around the country) are pushing litigants (that is people suing one another) to work things out without using the court process. After all, judges are quick to point out, a judgment by the court will be viewed as arbitrary; it’s sort of a zero-sum game where one person wins only because another person loses. Settlements that are not imposed, but agreed to — however reluctantly — by the parties are the opposite. Neither gets everything desired, but both get something, so it is a non-zero-summed game.

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