Every legal dispute comes down to a judgment call made with incomplete information — and wherever there's judgment, there are mental shortcuts quietly shaping the outcome. Host Dr. Laura Scherck Wittcoff sits down with Tricia Schafer, a full-time neutral who mediates and arbitrates cases nationwide, ahead of her TechTainment panel on implicit bias in tech-driven mediation. Together they unpack what implicit bias actually is (a normal function of the human brain, not a character flaw), why it matters most in entertainment and intellectual property disputes where there's rarely one objectively correct answer, and the practical, sometimes surprising strategies practitioners can use to design bias out of a process instead of pretending it isn't there.
Tricia Schafer, Tricia Schafer Dispute Resolution PLLC: A full-time neutral and former litigator with 31 years of experience across all aspects of commercial controversies, Tricia is known for connecting people and concepts to outcomes that transcend the sum of their parts. She mediates and arbitrates cases nationwide, both privately and through the American Arbitration Association, handling commercial, real estate, health care, and consumer matters, and was recently approved as a mediator for the United States Postal Service. Based in Arizona, she also volunteers with the state court system in civil and probate matters and offers reduced-rate work to select Arizona nonprofits. She first attended TechTainment in 2024 at a friend's suggestion — arriving knowing exactly one person and leaving with roughly two dozen new friends — and has been a loyal follower since. At this year's conference, she co-presents on implicit bias with longtime friend and colleague Maria Crimi Speth, a partner at Jaburg Wilk in Phoenix and a career intellectual property litigator.
What is TechTainment? TechTainment is an annual, one-day conference produced by LAIPLA, now held in partnership with the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University (ASU) at ASU's California Center in downtown Los Angeles. The conference brings together leaders in technology, entertainment, business, academia, and law to discuss the issues reshaping every industry, long before those issues become mainstream news.
- This year's conference: Friday, October 16, 2026, at ASU's California Center in downtown Los Angeles
- Tricia's panel: "Implicit Bias in Dispute Resolution and Mediation", co-presented with Maria Crimi Speth of Jaburg Wilk
- What implicit bias actually is: Implicit bias is not prejudice or intentional discrimination. It's a mental shortcut the brain uses to make decisions under incomplete information, limited time, or uncertainty — a normal part of being human, not a character flaw. Tricia's example makes it concrete: a Mercedes pulls into your driveway versus a beat-up pickup truck, and you've formed a judgment about the driver before you've seen them. It doesn't matter until you have to help that person resolve something that matters in their life.
- Why "neutral" is a noun: Tricia explains that "Neutral" is the catch-all for someone who serves as both mediator and arbitrator — a private-pay, secure way to resolve disputes outside of court. She also walks through the tradeoffs of arbitration: it's faster, it's private, it never becomes public record, and critically, you get to choose your decision-maker. File in court and you may draw a judge who spent 20 years in family law and just moved to the civil bench. Through the American Arbitration Association or another provider, you can ask for an environmental lawyer, an engineer, or a water lawyer. The cost: you pay your neutral's hourly rate, and there is almost no right to appeal.
- Positions versus interests, and the last orange in the house: Tricia walks through the foundational mediation exercise: two kids fighting over the last orange, and a parent's instinct to cut it in half. The better move is to ask each child why they want it — one is hungry, the other needs it for a science project — and suddenly there's a solution that makes both of them happy. As she puts it, a position is what you say you want and an interest is why you want it. Do you really want the money, or do you want the security of knowing you can keep the house? The related insight: "No" is never permanent. "No simply means I'm not going to change my position based upon the available information that I have right now."
- Designing bias out of the process: Tricia describes wanting software that would strip law firm letterhead off position statements before she reads them, and assign parties fake names, so she isn't forming judgments about counsel or making assumptions from the ethnicity of a surname — the same logic behind employers removing photos from resumes. She also shares a technique she uses now: she dumbs the fact pattern down, renames everyone, and spends half an hour working through the dynamic with an AI assistant. Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith fighting over a commercial building becomes Bob and Larry fighting over a pickup truck. The AI has no idea who anyone is, which is exactly the point.
- Where implicit bias shows up in entertainment and IP: Assumptions about how long creative work should take a human, and whether AI could do it faster. Assumptions about what a market wants and will pay for, made without consulting anyone who lives and works in that market. Confirmation bias in data used to argue for one direction over another. And the structural disadvantage facing independent creators, who often lack the resources to register, protect, or aggressively enforce their intellectual property — so their disputes get read as less significant. Tricia names the persistent disconnect between the rooms where decisions get made and the people actually watching and streaming the content.
- Dispute resolution is dispute prevention: One of the episode's most quotable lines, and the practical center of Tricia's advice. It's not if a dispute arises, it's when. Mediation clauses are now common in contracts — and, Tricia notes, most people don't realize those clauses are negotiable in any contract involving personal services or securing talent. "We'll mediate before we arbitrate before we litigate" means very little on its own. For how many days? What kind of mediator — an entertainment lawyer at $1,000 an hour, or a court-appointed one? In person or on Zoom? In good faith, and what does good faith mean? She points listeners to the sample clause language published by the major providers, including the AAA's ClauseBuilder tool, and notes you can even name the specific mediators you'd accept.
- Strategies for creators and practitioners without deep pockets: For anyone younger, newer, or under-resourced walking into a negotiation: go in without defensiveness, but look in the mirror first and ask what the other side is likely to assume about you — then stay ahead of it. On the other side of the table, for the corporations and the streamers: you know statistically what your audience does, but you don't know what's in their heads or why they're watching what they're watching. Follow the data, and also build a team of decision-makers with genuinely different perspectives.
- Normalizing bias instead of denying it: Tricia's hope for what people take away from her session: bias is not bad. Bias is not negative. She'd like to see the same shift the culture has already made around therapy and health tracking — from something you'd never mention to something you say out loud. Her image of what that looks like in practice: a mediator who can say "I feel like I'm getting a little biased from this room, I need to take a five-minute break." Laura's response: when you pretend it doesn't exist, it creeps in anyway.
How to Get Involved
- Register and learn more: LAIPLA.net/techtainment
- Pricing: Multiple tiers are available, including discounted rates for in-house attorneys, law students, LAIPLA members, and ASU alumni
- Attend: The conference includes breakfast, lunch, and extensive networking opportunities
- Connect with Tricia: TriciaSchafer.com
Connect with Small & Gutsy Website: SmallandGutsy.org Email: Laura@SmallandGutsy.org Do you know a nonprofit or social enterprise doing incredible work? Send them our way!
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