James Bond enters a casino where a beautiful girl is sitting at the bar. He approaches her, buys her a drink and makes his obligatory introduction: “Bond, James Bond…” After brief chatting, she asks him about his profession. Then, the usually reckless hero comes up with a cover story: “I am a mediator… Traveling to…

In recent years, Vietnam has boosted its legal framework for commercial mediation. The story began with the promulgation of the new Civil Procedure Code 2015 whose Chapter 33 serves as the legal basis for the recognition of out-of-court mediated settlement agreements. Then, the Government issued Decree no. 22/2017/ND-CP on Commercial Mediation (“Decree 22”) detailing and…

Brazil is on its way to making lawyers mandatory on mediation procedures. Last month the House of Representatives approved a bill (PL 5.511/2016) that reads, in a free translation, “it is mandatory the presence of Lawyers in consensual dispute resolution procedures, such as mediation and conciliation”. Now the Senate will analyze the subject before it…

(This post is being republished because of technical problems when it was first published) The recently reported Australian case of Ku-ring-gai Council v Ichor Constructions Pty Ltd [2018] NSWSC 610 (8 May 2018) provides a useful lesson in how not to conduct the hybrid Arb-Med-Arb process, from which (I hope) we might learn how to…

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” Pablo Picasso. Last month I travelled to Edinburgh for the International Academy of Mediators conference, chaired and hosted by John Sturrock. The theme of the conference was “Looking outward – mediation: a new enlightenment?” Not only was…

Here in Singapore, along with the rest of the world, we await the Trump-Kim Summit scheduled for Tuesday 12 June. What can we expect? While we may have learned to expect the unexpected from these two leaders, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, recent media reports have highlighted one apparently predictable feature of Trump’s negotiation approach….

The International Association of Mediators conference in Edinburgh last month provided a great opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned from the application of a principled negotiation approach, as set out in ‘Getting to Yes’. The conference benefited from the experience of over a hundred leading mediators from around twenty countries, along with policy makers…

It cannot be suggested that mediation in Greece has been a success, yet. It cannot be said that it has been a failure either. The fact of the matter is that few cases have been to mediation to date in this country, hence in practice it is an unfamiliar process for citizens and companies. However,…

I write this in the aftermath of the really uplifting and wonderfully diverse conference which I had the privilege to host and chair recently in my home city, under the auspices of the International Academy of Mediators. Nearly 120 mediators from over 20 countries attended and shared deep discussions about how we as mediators can…

We finished module 2 of our flagship training course last week. One of our participants emailed me the next day: “I was driving up the road yesterday and mulling over one aspect of the mediation exercise we did. I get that we are facilitating adults to make fully informed autonomous decisions and that they need…