At a recent excellent conference hosted by Professor Ulla Glaesser at Viadrina University in Frankfurt (Oder), one of the workshop sessions focussed on the extent to which mediators can or should disclose or express their views when engaged in politically-related mediation work – or more generally. What a fascinating conversation we had. It was no…

Hot off the press, the case of Chan Gek Yong v Violet Netto (practising as L F Violet Netto) and another and another matter [2018] SGHC 208 (‘Violet Netto’) decided by the Singapore High Court provides us with clues as to the Court’s general attitude towards mediation and mediated settlement agreements (‘MSAs’). It is useful…

The arrival of the internet age has posed many new challenges as a larger part of the economy has started to operate online and transnationally with a new emerging framework. After the spread of the global computer network and the rise of online business activities and operations, it became necessary for disputes between contracting parties…

My colleague and fellow Kluwer author Charlie Woods has likened my scatter-gun approach to starting new projects and coming up with new ideas to “guerrilla gardening”. I am sure he means it as a compliment. Some ideas take seed…. So, here is another seed. Just a week or two ago, I was reading a (UK)…

(This post is being republished because of technical problems when it was first published.) One of the key debates among mediators centres on the word ‘evaluation’. I’ve written about this before – see Has the evaluative label outlived its usefulness? I’m sure many readers are familiar, even bored, with the claimed polarity between facilitative and…

In the first few months of this year I found myself returning to Vietnam a number of times thanks to Vietnamese initiatives in commercial mediation. Most recently I was involved in workshops hosted by the Vietnam Business Lawyer’s Club, the Judicial Academy and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Given the mediation activity in Vietnam and…

A good friend of mine was recently surprised to see a robot cutting the grass around a well-known landmark in Edinburgh. Coincidentally this was around the same time as I came across a speech given by Adair Turner in April this year entitled “Capitalism in the age of robots: work, income and wealth in the…

The forthcoming Singapore Convention on Mediation will be the first UN Treaty named after Singapore. At the 51st Session of the United Nations (UN) Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) on 26 June 2018, the final drafts of the Convention on the Enforcement of International Settlement Agreements and corresponding Model Law were approved. A resolution…