Recently, Dr. Grant Morris of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand completed valuable research on the nature of private commercial mediation in New Zealand. The aim of the June 2016 research was to examine the commercial mediation market from a gatekeepers’ perspective – that inevitably meant lawyers were the main source of data. Commercial lawyers at…

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….

Cogniscenti (and readers of Ema Vidak-Gojkovic’s blog The UNCITRAL Convention on Enforcement of Conciliated Settlement Agreements – An Idea Whose Time Has Come?) will know that talks are ongoing in an attempt to see if it is possible to find a common system for the direct enforceability of agreements concluded in mediation. This is a…

First of all a very happy New Year to all our readers! May 2016 bring you peace, happiness and many, many hours of successful mediation. Here in Ireland, all we would really like is for it to stop raining, even for an hour or two. With the last month having been the wettest on record,…

In the late 90’s in Brazil, a sudden interest in Mediation started to develop under the influence of the newly enacted Argentinean legislation (1995). Unfortunately, just until a few years ago, mediation had grown at a very slow pace, with a few advocates effortlessly lobbying for its widespread implementation and for a local legislation. Finally,…

This article may be helpful particularly if you consider settling a case as a party or as an advisor. There are many perspectives that one can consider when looking at mediation. One example is that our current mediation culture is still in development. Therefore, sometimes, parties ask me, the mediator, to invite the other party…

I would like to spend this month’s entry reporting on the recent developments in the Singapore Court of Appeal. The case of Surindar Singh s/o Jaswant Singh v Sita Jaswant Kaur [2014] SGCA 37 make a number of pronouncements about the status of settlement agreements brought about by mediation in the context of the division…

I have been reflecting recently on the individual and collective professional journeys we all undertake – and on the different stages we reach. My reading has taken me to a thought-provoking book by theologian Richard Rohr, entitled Falling Upward. Rohr’s thesis, put very simply, is that there are two stages to life. The first, necessary,…