Events last Friday have resulted in a harrowing few days for we mediators forced to move our practice online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve all been using Zoom. Zoom immediately emerged as the “go-to” platform for video mediation for the simple reason it offered “break-out rooms”, a function inexplicably absent in FaceTime,…

On January 3rd, the International Mediation Institute (IMI) released the first of eight documents reporting on the Global Pound Conference (GPC) events held in North America between 2016-17. IMI promises to release the remaining six-city reports, including the GPC Toronto Report, plus the GPC North America Report during January. While it’s hard to understand why…

  A developing story here in Canada has raised concerns about whether the public should have the right to know the terms of a high profile, mediated settlement agreement involving the government of Canada. The case involves now retired Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, the former number two in the Canadian military. The detailed background of the…

Let’s talk some more about mediation research. To recap, in his February 2019 post to this Blog, Michael Leathes argued for the need for more field-based research into mediation. He asked, “What if a vast range of mediation skills and techniques could be radically improved by new data derived from large-scale national and international field…

Does the currently predominant model of commercial mediation – a single session of 3 or 6 hours – support good decision-making by litigants? Some doubt is cast by recent Canadian scholarship dealing with the psychological costs of litigation. In their 2017 paper, Anticipating and Managing the Psychological Costs of Civil Litigation, authors Michaela Keet, Heather…