Quality standards for the mediator? What conditions are needed for the successful outcome of a mediation? Without parties’ commitment to really resolve the conflict and settle the case, no success is possible. So commitment of the parties is a sine qua non. Still, we must also look at the mediator, who may be essential for…

The recent decision in Gao Hai Yan & Anor v Keeneye Holdings Ltd & Others [2011] HKEC 514, (the “wining and dining” mediation case) has generated a considerable amount of interest in the murky depths of the Arbitration-Mediation (“Arb-Med”) facility. Practitioners and academics are still engaged in deep discourse nearly two months after the case…

I will never forget my first day in a mediation class where one word that reverberated over a hundred times was “interest, interest and interest”! “Focus on underlying interests’ was the phrase that dominated the experience that I truly got bored. That was a mistake as I bungled the very first mediation I was called…

Cartesian philosophy encouraged the fragmentation of knowledge and made it possible for different subjects and their branches to appear. Such fact brought about the expansion of knowledge in a microscopic way. Having become highly specialized man believed he had mastered all knowledge without realizing at first he had lost the perspective of the whole. Such…

Picking up where I left off last post, I want to discuss what I consider to be a major problem with the Ontario Commercial Mediation Act, 2010 (OCMA) relating to the admissibility of evidence of what occurred during a mediation. Generally (with some exceptions) at Common Law anything said or done in mediation is inadmissible…

Regardless if the reader is a practicing mediator, an attorney, a user or an academic, the preparation stage of mediation should be of interest and viewed as being vital for a successful mediation. There’s simply too much to retrieve if a mediation is not properly prepared and it’s up to the mediator to make sure…

Civil trial lawyers have been testing new techniques to persuade since our constitution authorized the right to jury trials. In the past several years, trial consultants have encouraged use of various strategies ranging from improvisational acting, psychodrama to the current ‘reptile’ approach. The reptile approach is highly effective in that it challenges people to make…

Like many of us I am constantly torn between simplicity and complexity. The world is complex: that’s a given. But a beautiful morning or a lover’s kiss is simplicity itself, and it’s a fool who overcomplicates it. And so with mediation, the profession/activity/vocation that has grown on me like a skin these last nineteen years….

The ICC International Commercial Mediation Competition is the only moot I know of devoted to international commercial mediation and it will take place in Paris in early February. It’s an annual event organized by the International Chamber of Commerce and has become the best excuse to travel to Paris, drink coffee and eat pastries on the…