The year 2016 has so far been a significant one for Singapore in the area of ADR. The opening of the Singapore Legal Year saw the Chief Justice of Singapore, Mr. Sundaresh Menon introducing various ADR-related initiatives in family justice cases and medical malpractice matters. This has been explored in a previous blog entry here….

Recap Last time I wrote as a young mediator about my mediation path, I had just arrived in Tbilisi, Georgia. It was February 2014, when people began being killed at the Euromaidan on Independence Square in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. I was trying to ‘break into the peacebuilding field‘ but did not have much…

I begin with two poetic images. One is from an 8th century Taoist poem – I asked the boy beneath the pines. He said, “The master’s gone alone Herb-picking somewhere on the mount, Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.” [Chia Tao (777-841)] And the other, more recent, from W H Auden’s poem “Law Like Love”: And always the…

As I write this, I am looking across the Gulf of Aqaba at the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, near the place where the Egyptian border abuts Israel, south of the Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat. This morning’s BBC news tells us that Israel is on alert for IS attacks in the Sinai. The accompanying…

In this blog, I’ll follow up on Deborah Masucci’s overview, and in doing so I’ll offer a three observations about technology and one about a very non-technological aspect of mediation. First, on the technology: as those who were there will know only too well, and those who have followed at arm’s length will appreciate, the…

Three recent mediations in three jurisdictions raised some interesting issues.  Each mediation was different. One involved a claim for professional negligence against a firm of solicitors for (allegedly) incorrectly including an occupied building in the sale of a large piece of land. The sellers were unhappy that many years had elapsed since the transaction, a number of them passing while…

One of the most interesting developments in business dispute resolution over the last decade is the way in which different methods of resolution are being harmonized. The EU Directive on Mediation is one example of this phenomenon, as well as several comprehensive early case assessment and conflict management programs rolled out by multinationals across their…

This week the South China Morning Post featured an article entitled “Why the theories of Einstein, climate change or evolution can never be proved right”. Referring to recent world headlines that Einstein’s theory on gravitational waves had finally been proven, the writer, Timothy Wotherspoon, argues that a scientific theory can never been proven right. He…

This post was prepared in cooperation with Bogdan Matei. Neutrality is one of the keystone concepts in the mediation process. When the mediator or the parties consider that the mediator’s neutrality is affected, a conflict of interest appears. It is well known that when a conflict of interests appears, in respect to the ethical rules…

In 1861, the then Secretary to the Education Department, Robert Lowe, addressed the UK House of Commons on the pressing matter of elementary education, in particular on the linked questions of access to education, funding, and quality. His proposal was to introduce a system of “payment for results”, designed both to limit the costs of…