ABOUT US

Kimberly Canova
Kimberly Canova is a licensed attorney in the State of Arkansas and has practiced law in the Northwest Arkansas area since 1992. She received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Hendrix College in 1989 and her Juris Doctorate from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1992. Kimberly has spoken at several continuing legal education seminars over the years at the request of the Arkansas Bar Association and the National Business Institute.

Kimberly became a certified mediator through the Arkansas Alternative Dispute Resolution Commission in 2005. To become a certified mediator and maintain her certification, she receives ongoing mediation training and her ethical standards are checked by the Administrative Office of the Courts.

Kimberly became involved in mediation as she saw a need for a better solution for conflict resolution. Because she has been actively involved as a trial lawyer since 1992, she has seen the emotional and financial turmoil that can result from litigation. While our system of law in Arkansas is just, it is not what you see on TV. It can take months and sometimes years to get your case on the Court’s docket. Communication between lawyers is, more often than not, very poor resulting in a failure to present different ideas of how to resolve the conflict. Too often, lawyers do not even really discuss the case with each other or even their own client until shortly before the trial, leaving the client in the dark. After you do get your day in court, you may find that, due to certain rules of evidence and procedure, things that you want the Judge to hear are inadmissible. Also, while all of our Judges in the Northwest Arkansas area do their job well, it is difficult for any judge to hear a few hours of testimony and make decisions that will oftentimes impact people’s lives forever based on the limited amount of information they were given.

Because of these problems with the legal system, Kimberly decided to become a part of the solution. That solution is to provide a format for parties in conflict to come together and exchange information and ideas face to face. The key to conflict resolution is communication. The best communication, even in our high tech world of texting, emailing, and facebooking, is face to face communication. As a mediator, Kimberly brings the parties together and identifies the issues each party wants addressed. The parties speak openly and sometimes get to talk about issues that might not have been admissible in Court. After the issues have been identified, everyone works together to draft solutions to those problems. Sometimes these solutions are remedies that you could not even get in Court.

The best resolution to any conflict is a resolution hand drafted by the conflicting parties – not a judgment from the Court that is being forced on both parties. If parties are unable to resolve their issues in mediation, the judicial system is ready and waiting and the Court will certainly reach a resolution – it just might not be as good of a solution as the parties could have drafted since they, better than the Judge or their lawyers, know their situation.