good mediation seen through a client's lens

“Like poets, but with less time” The Deep End Getting to grips with mediation can leave students and trainees overwhelmed. That favourite training tool, the roleplay, throws most in at the deep end. The sudden immersion forces them to speak, listen and observe while trying to remember models and skills plus a sea of reading…

With few exceptions, mediation is still used in less than 1% of the cases that are pending in the courts of justice from Romania and of other European Union member states. Public policies and adopted legislative solutions are not capable of generating a culture of dialogue, conflict prevention, or amicable settlement. In this context, the…

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…

Romanian mediators are called on the 2nd and the 3rd of March 2019 to vote for the election of the members of the Romanian Mediation Council. Nine members and three alternates of the Mediation Council 2019-2023 will be elected for a four-year term by 4821 mediators that are authorized for practice in Romania. At the…

Time Limited Mediation

“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…

We Australians love sport in general and cricket in particular. Unless you have been living in a cave, with no access to any media reporting whatsoever, you will know that the Australian cricket team is under a cloud. Saturday March 24th 2018 was the third day of the third cricket test between Australia and South…

The Dilemma: At an initial private meeting with a lawyer and his lay client in a mediation, it became obvious to the mediator that he had previously mediated in a matter which was related to the present dispute, the outcome of which was not known to the present parties. In the mediator’s view, it had…

I was outside a city-centre store in the drizzle and dark two days ago, wondering whether my brain was made for better things than standing reflecting on waiting for my wife to emerge from a busy shop with another last-minute Christmas present. The human brain is a wondrous thing; we waste its powers in the…