I will never forget my first day in a mediation class where one word that reverberated over a hundred times was “interest, interest and interest”! “Focus on underlying interests’ was the phrase that dominated the experience that I truly got bored. That was a mistake as I bungled the very first mediation I was called…
Cartesian philosophy encouraged the fragmentation of knowledge and made it possible for different subjects and their branches to appear. Such fact brought about the expansion of knowledge in a microscopic way. Having become highly specialized man believed he had mastered all knowledge without realizing at first he had lost the perspective of the whole. Such…
Picking up where I left off last post, I want to discuss what I consider to be a major problem with the Ontario Commercial Mediation Act, 2010 (OCMA) relating to the admissibility of evidence of what occurred during a mediation. Generally (with some exceptions) at Common Law anything said or done in mediation is inadmissible…
Regardless if the reader is a practicing mediator, an attorney, a user or an academic, the preparation stage of mediation should be of interest and viewed as being vital for a successful mediation. There’s simply too much to retrieve if a mediation is not properly prepared and it’s up to the mediator to make sure…
Civil trial lawyers have been testing new techniques to persuade since our constitution authorized the right to jury trials. In the past several years, trial consultants have encouraged use of various strategies ranging from improvisational acting, psychodrama to the current ‘reptile’ approach. The reptile approach is highly effective in that it challenges people to make…
It has been said one cannot ask a fish what water is. When something so surrounds us, it is often invisible to us. The same thing can be said of our environment. It exists in the background and often by-passes our conscious attention. Yet, it affects us in subtle ways which can affect our feeling…
Like many of us I am constantly torn between simplicity and complexity. The world is complex: that’s a given. But a beautiful morning or a lover’s kiss is simplicity itself, and it’s a fool who overcomplicates it. And so with mediation, the profession/activity/vocation that has grown on me like a skin these last nineteen years….
As I write these lines, I am working on a commercial mediation project in the Pacific nation of Samoa – yes the one that has just jumped across the international dateline. My blog post today is a reflection on an aspect of this work that is relevant, not just to me, but to any of…
I participated to mediation training over a weekend last December, as part of continuing education of a local non-profit association I chair and which is involved in community mediation (Association genevoise de médiation de voisinage – AsMéd-GE – www.mediation-de-voisinage.ch). Such training was conducted by a well-known and prominent figure of the mediation in France, Mrs….
This year brings an overlap of winter holidays from two different traditions and calendars: Hanukkah and Christmas. Each of these holidays is a story of miracles – wondrous events occurring in times of conflict. In one story, Jewish rebels defeat the Syrian king who outlawed Judaism. Taking back the great temple in Jerusalem from the…
