Anyone managing international business disputes needs to understand the Singapore Convention on Mediation. Not just its terms and limitations, but the reasons why certain matters are included and why others are omitted, as well as how to interpret and apply it. All mediated business settlements with an international angle that are concluded from now on…

My February 4, 2019 post What if Mediation Science Originated in the Real World? sparked much useful comment. Many people said they regretted the deficiency of negotiation and mediation field research, but were dismayed that I offered no proposals for fixing it. How, they asked, do you generate large-scale, real-life negotiation data? So, may I…

Early in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1891 short story A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes gives Watson a lecture on the difference between seeing and observing. To test how well Watson understood, Holmes hands him an unaddressed, undated, anonymous letter that had just arrived on the doormat. It announced that an unnamed visitor would shortly…

While working on the manuscript for a book published last year (Negotiation: Things Corporate Counsel need to know but were not taught – Wolters Kluwer, 2017), I submitted a draft to an eclectic peer group from all around the world to gauge whether I was on the right track. The group comprised corporate counsel, business…

Days after June’s UK Brexit Referendum, US Secretary of State John Kerry advised that: It is absolutely essential that we stay focused on how, in this transitional period, nobody looses their head, nobody goes off half-cocked, people don’t start ginning up scatterbrained or revengeful premises. Yet since then prominent voices on both sides have engaged…

It is one of the defining characteristics of professions whose stakeholders invest great trust in their practitioners. Doctors make the Hippocratic Oath. Accountants, lawyers, police officers, elected officials, social workers, veterinarians and others in a position of trust also make various forms of oaths. Almost always there is a code of professional conduct and disciplinary…

Being responsible for resolving a large number of disputes for any organization is a stressful occupation. It involves risk, cost and resources and navigating between leadership and management, success and failure as well as blame and experimentation. Although there is no magic bullet, the task can be aided considerably by harvesting the answers to the…

In his now famous Stanford Commencement Address in June 2005, Steve Jobs remarked: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life…. [and] to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” One of the choices that we all…

As usual, Confucius said it first: Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated. This truism is becoming increasingly applicable to mediation law. Take England & Wales for example. In just 20 years, court judgments, procedural rules, orders, cost implications, practice directions, policy statements and other reforms have mushroomed, and keep growing….