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…

It is common to hear people observe, reflecting on the pandemic, that things will never go back to the way they were. There is certainly good reason to believe that virtual meetings are now a fact of life. If you “zoom” you are either moving fast or teleconferencing on Zoom, capitalization optional, according to the…

In 2015, I retired as an American law professor. For most of my career, I used some of the basic concepts of our field such as negotiation, BATNA, positional vs. interest-based negotiation, and facilitative vs. evaluative mediation. I wasn’t always comfortable with these terms, but I used them because I couldn’t imagine shifting to alternatives….

In recent years, mediation has been actively discussed for the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) regime, particularly as a means of reducing costs and delays. This interest is one reaction to growing discontent about the option of investor-state arbitration (ISA) typically offered by host states in international investment treaties, to make substantive commitments (like non-discrimination) more…

This is the final part of a series of posts on The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy’s (‘SIDRA’) recently released International Dispute Resolution Survey: 2020 Final Report (‘2020 SIDRA Survey’). The SIDRA Survey delves into the user experiences of Legal Users (lawyers and legal advisers) and Client Users (corporate executives and in-house counsel) in international…

For this blogpost I interviewed Lin Adrian, associate professor of mediation and director of the master’s in Mediation and Conflict Resolution at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Together with the master’s in Mediation and Conflict Management at the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt / Oder Germany, Lin conducted an empirical study on the effects of mediation…

The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA) released its International Dispute Resolution Survey: 2020 Final Report (‘2020 SIDRA Survey’) on 3 July. It is a compendium of the experiences and views of legal and client users from common and civil law jurisdictions on why and how they choose dispute resolution mechanisms to resolve cross-border disputes….

In his blogpost of December 2019, Alan Limbury gives us a thoughtful reminder of the history and background to the GPC. I too was in the audience at London’s historic Guildhall on October 29, 2014, when IMI gathered together users of mediation, lawyers, mediators, academics and others involved in dispute resolution processes and began an…

Stop apologising

(This blog is adapted from a longer version published by Prof John Lande as part of Theories of Change for the Dispute Resolution Movement: Actionable Ideas to Revitalize Our Movement. The Theory of Change symposium asked mediators and scholars to think big about their dreams and visions for the future, and was recently published on…