Being a mediator brings surprises along the way. For me, I was presented with what turned out to be the biggest challenge of my professional career last November when the Cabinet Secretary for Health in Scotland appointed me to conduct a review of allegations made by staff (through whistle-blowers) of bullying and harassment in Scotland’s…

The success of international arbitration, among others, is owed to the New York Convention, which provided tools for global enforcement of arbitral awards. To that end, international mediation has been underused often because of the lack of necessary international enforcement mechanisms of mediated settlement agreements. The Singapore Convention on Enforcement of Mediated Settlement Agreements (Singapore…

National Mediation Conferences are important events. Apart from the great opportunities to network with fellow professionals there is the really important opportunity to see the intersection of research and practice at work. Last month’s Australia’s National Mediation Conference did not disappoint. For me the highlight was becoming acquainted with a bold Australian initiative sponsored by…

My February 4, 2019 post What if Mediation Science Originated in the Real World? sparked much useful comment. Many people said they regretted the deficiency of negotiation and mediation field research, but were dismayed that I offered no proposals for fixing it. How, they asked, do you generate large-scale, real-life negotiation data? So, may I…

Mediation has found increased statutory recognition in India and the legislature has recently introduced it in the Companies Act 2013, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016, as well as the Commercial Courts Act 2015, among others. Two separate updates from the Supreme Court of India this month have engaged the Indian community in the discussion…

Last week I was reading an essay by the American novelist Jonathan Franzen, and was struck by the following thought: “The essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best […] invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.”…

[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…

The forthcoming Singapore Mediation Convention aims at ensuring the international “direct” enforcement of Mediated Settlement Agreements (“MSAs”) worldwide (see the post by Nadja Alexander, on a short description of the Convention). This means that an MSA shall be enforced directly in any Singapore Mediation Convention contracting state, without a prior review or granting of enforcing…

I was again privileged to be at the ICC International Commercial Mediation Competition in early February, which this time included a new event – an intergenerational round table, workshops for student and professional participants together. It began with an hour of dialogue around one table, where participants were asked to generate and discuss questions for…

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…