Writing this first 2021 post is a task that leads me to make an inevitable retrospective of the past year – 2020. A year to be remembered and whose events have been unrivalled by any others in recent humankind history. The past year was indeed a challenging one, a time when negotiation and mediation skills…
I write this in the aftermath of yet another mediation in which the protagonists exhibited symptoms of having been seriously traumatised by the litigation process to which they had been exposed. Depression, suicidal thoughts, anger, loathing, destroyed relationships, large amounts of money spent with no discernible value. And this was a commercial situation, not a…
Covid is the gift that keeps on giving. It has provided a wonderful focus for blame that has let us off the hook for a lot of things. It has coincided with significant changes in our mediation experiences and again has been seized on as the culprit when mediation sessions go ‘off piste’. The new…
Just recently (November 4th), hackers attacked Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice (Superior Tribunal de Justiça – STJ). Not only they had access to the Court’s system and encrypted its entire database but also demanded ransom money to restore it. In other words, they succeeded in hacking one of the most centralized courts in the Brazilian…
I say regularly that students make the best teachers. My students continue to prove me right. In my recent ADR program I confessed to my undergraduate students that having a conversation about culture was something that made me very anxious. I feel poorly prepared and I fear, with the best intentions, causing offence and appearing…
The Brazilian Mediation Act (Law 13140/2015) establishes that “the object of mediation may be a dispute over “disposable” (transferable or waivable) rights or non-disposable, non-waivable rights which are able to be negotiated” (art. 3). In this sense, we wonder if mediation will be available to all the new conflicts that will emerge from the new…
In recent years, mediation has been actively discussed for the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) regime, particularly as a means of reducing costs and delays. This interest is one reaction to growing discontent about the option of investor-state arbitration (ISA) typically offered by host states in international investment treaties, to make substantive commitments (like non-discrimination) more…
The deeply-felt norm of conducting mediation on a single day is eroding as everyone adjusts to the realities of the coronavirus crisis and people appreciate the benefits of spreading out the process over time. This post describes the evolution around the world to what I have called “planned early multi-stage mediation.” One-Day Mediations For many…
This is the final part of a series of posts on The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy’s (‘SIDRA’) recently released International Dispute Resolution Survey: 2020 Final Report (‘2020 SIDRA Survey’). The SIDRA Survey delves into the user experiences of Legal Users (lawyers and legal advisers) and Client Users (corporate executives and in-house counsel) in international…
The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA) released its International Dispute Resolution Survey: 2020 Final Report (‘2020 SIDRA Survey’) on 3 July. It is a compendium of the experiences and views of legal and client users from common and civil law jurisdictions on why and how they choose dispute resolution mechanisms to resolve cross-border disputes….
