As I mentioned before in some posts here at Kluwer, according to the Brazilian National Council of Justice, there are close to 90 million lawsuits currently in course in the country. Moreover, on average, it takes around 10 years for a lawsuit to reach closure if all appeals have been exhausted. Interestingly enough , one…

Mediation has long been used as a method of resolving disputes. Indeed, the practice of combining mediation and arbitration by the same neutral has been traced back to ancient Greece and Ptolemaic Egypt[1]. In his paper “Varieties of Dispute Processing”, presented to the 1976 Pound Conference, Harvard Professor Frank E.A. Sander proposed that, instead of…

Three people negotiating at a table

Soon after I started mediating, a client said “This must be a really satisfying job, when it’s successful.” I remember thinking it’s really satisfying even when it isn’t. This was my first glimpse of a question that has fascinated me ever since: what makes mediators tick? Why would anyone place themselves in midst of other…

Dispute resolution competitions are a rich learning space for students. My 15+ years coaching teams from my university to compete internationally were a rich experience for me and I enjoy continuing opportunities to be part of the competition community nationally and internationally. It has also been my great good fortune to observe and judge hundreds…

This blog was written by Petra Drgoňová (Lawyer & International Accredited Mediator) and Constantin Adi Gavrilă. Gender equality, the state of men and women having equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities, represents a vital prerequisite for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. The relevance of gender equality has been recognized by major societal actors across numerous…

Insomnia drove me to a late-night television binge recently and I watched a rerun of  Pretty Woman, the 1990 movie starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. For those of you yet to see this movie, its great strength is that it offers lines that are useful for almost every moment of your life. ‘You must…

The idea of using insights from behavioural science to achieve desirable policy goals burst into popular consciousness with the publication of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (R Thaler and C Sunstein, Yale University Press, 2008.) It describes the appealing notion that people can be encouraged to make good choices by the way…

The inspiration to write this article came from a film I watched recently – The Whale – starring Brendan Fraser, who plays an obese man leading an extremely sedentary life. In my opinion, his character’s (Charlie) physiognomy is one of the elements that captures the story narrative. Again, the inspiration to write the article, after…

One of the great professional satisfactions of being part of the mediation community is that it sits within a much wider cluster of non-adjudicative processes. This proximity to a broader cluster represents an opportunity for learning, experiment and the exercise of curiosity and investigation. In Australia, the cluster of which mediation is a part  includes…

The consultation phase of the independent review of the Australian National Mediator Accreditation System (NMAS Review 2020-22) was completed in May and Findings and Recommendations are now available. The NMAS has been reviewed twice since its implementation in 2008. The Mediator Standards Board(MSB) share on their website that the most recent review was led by…