[Future by Nick Youngson Creative Commons] The ICC International Commercial Mediation Competition is over and these pages have been full of reflections from a number of bloggers who were there and experienced ‘aha’ moments. In particular, Greg Bond’s thoughtful post about the Intergenerational RoundTable promoted a lot of discussion about what we should be doing…
As the practice of cross-border mediation grows, it is imperative for legal and other professional advisers involved in drafting mediated settlement agreements (MSAs) to become familiar with how different courts deal with litigation about MSAs. In this post, we look at a recent 2019 decision of the Singapore High Court, Jumaiah bte Amir and Another…
“If you had not held us back that evening, the deal would not have been done.” “Thank you and I wish you well.” In this post, I return to a familiar theme for mediators and for lawyers acting for clients in mediation: perseverance. The first of the two quotations above comes from a participant in…
Although infrequent, court cases against mediators are illuminating, helping us avoid being dragged into court ourselves. Here’s an example In Tapoohi v Lewenberg & Ors (No 2) [2003] VSC 410, the Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia, considered it arguable that a mediator owes a duty of care to the disputants. The mediated dispute This was…
You are usually at a disadvantage for you will take over the boat in midst of the conflict storm without having the chance to prepare the crew and to check on the ship. Yet you are charged to navigate the vessel through all perils of misunderstandings, mistrust, and perceptions. It takes time to make sure…
I wish to add to Michael Leathes’ recent post on his suggestion that more field-based research be done into the mediation product and Rick Weiler’s follow-up. There are really two distinct questions here. One relates to whether, with enough real-world research, we can put mediation in a nice box with a ribbon around it and…
“It is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer.” William of Ockham A colleague recently asked me to present a workshop to employment mediators on ‘Time Limited Mediation.’ Until that moment, like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman realising he’s been speaking prose all his life, it hadn’t occurred to me that this was…
Michael Leathes in his recent thought provoking post argues for the need for more “field-based” mediation research by which he means actual observations of the live action by skilled researchers. He poses the questions: “Has the mediation world spent too long developing lab-based facts to suit its theories? Might it start to hone new theories…
Early in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1891 short story A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes gives Watson a lecture on the difference between seeing and observing. To test how well Watson understood, Holmes hands him an unaddressed, undated, anonymous letter that had just arrived on the doormat. It announced that an unnamed visitor would shortly…
As mediators, we walk a delicate line between acknowledging and valuing the realities of the past and the present, with all the dysfunction and failings which have contributed to the conflict, and focusing on the present and the future with the opportunities they present to shape something new. Both are important, neither can be short-changed….
