McGeorge law taps negotiation expert as new dean

Michael T. Colatrella Jr., a national expert in negotiation and dispute resolution, will take the helm of the McGeorge School of Law on July 1. He said he wants students leaving the school to be skilled in the art of dispute resolution as well.

"Negotiation is something every lawyer does," Colatrella said in an interview with the Daily Journal earlier this year.

Colatrella said it feels a little "like an accident" that he is taking the reins of the school at a time when his specialty is so in demand. But he said attorneys have long done much of their work through diverse types of mediation and arbitration. When he was a litigator at Reed Smith Shaw & McClay in New Jersey, Colatrella said, over 80% of his cases were resolved through some type of negotiation.

This trend will only accelerate moving forward. The NextGen bar exam under development by the National Conference of Bar Examiners is designed partly to better test students' skills relating to arbitration and mediation.

He added, "If you're a transactional attorney, you're going to negotiate. If you're a 'regular attorney,' you're negotiating. It's central, yet most law schools don't require it."

Colatrella has played a key role in making sure the Sacramento-based McGeorge stays ahead of this trend. He came to the school in 2009 after serving as director of Southern Methodist University's Center for Dispute Resolution & Conflict Management in Texas. He also regularly took part in mediations while at SMU, though he said his McGeorge schedule has given him less time to practice.

He soon moved into a series of leadership roles. Colatrella was named associate dean for academic affairs in 2015. According to a news release from the school, he helped shepherd "the law school through the first months of the tumultuous COVID-19 pandemic." In 2023, McGeorge named him the inaugural Tracy A. Eglet Chair in Alternative Dispute Resolution.

In some ways, the tenures of Schwartz and now Colatrella mirror trends at McGeorge and in the wider legal profession. Schwartz is a well-known expert in law school teaching and the author of several legal textbooks. He oversaw a period in which he shrank the school's enrollment but raised its academic standing. The school's bar passage rate also shot up; it posted the highest passage rate among California's American Bar Association accredited schools on the February 2024 exam.

Colatrella said he will now try to expand the school's role in teaching skills beyond "black letter law."

"There's an emphasis now on doing more," he said. "For example, client counseling is a really big part of what lawyers of any kind do now."

He also wants to work to change the "argument map" many attorneys have in their head when they graduate. This is a mental map of how to operate as an attorney, and it has long been based on the adversarial system of litigation in which many expected to spend their professional lives.

"That's the hardest thing to do, I think, and to help students to appreciate," Colatrella said. "When I see an attorney doing a really good job, like really understanding that it is all going to be mostly about concession-making and horse trading, I'm always impressed. But it is rare. Mostly I see a lot of arguing and stalling, and that's why things tend to take too long."

He added that his background "can't hurt" when it comes to the many demands of being a law dean--or at least he hopes so.

"As dean, you're going to negotiate with all these constituents," Colatrella said. "You're going to negotiate with faculty and staff and university leaders and community leaders. Negotiation as a leader is just a big part of the puzzle."

He will take over on July 1 when Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz steps down after eight years on the job.