What is Collaborative Law and Practice? Collaborative Law is a mode of dispute settlement, mainly used in family disputes (divorce, separation) and sometimes in civil matters (inheritance, commercial disputes), allowing the disputants to work as a team with trained professionals to resolve disputes respectfully without going to court. The Minnesota (USA) family lawyer Stu Webb…
As globalisation progresses and migration increases, the number of bi-national and bi-cultural relationships and marriages is increasing. This brings a new richness and diversity to our society, but can also bring new challenges and difficulties when those relationships break down. One of the difficulties that can arise is international parental child abduction, where one parent…
Problems in group practices of medical group practices or commercial partnerships between lawyers, advisers, accountants, consultants are very common. My mediation practice consists for about 50% of group-mediations concerning cooperation-problems between partners in lawyer-firms, doctors-cooperations and other commercial partnerships. One of the major issues seems to be that clear communication about what is really the…
1. Failing to get the right people at the table. 2. Failing to explain the mediator’s role as agent of reality. 3. Permitting settlement negotiations to begin prematurely – prior to permitting the parties to vent or prior to risk analysis and reality testing. 4. Failing to orchestrate the negotiations by discouraging out of the…
This week I came across an article in Forbes magazine (not my usual reading, I hasten to add!) which irritated and inspired me in equal measure. Under the title “The Ten Most Peaceful Countries Don’t Include US” it highlighted the world’s ten most peaceful countries as measured by the “Negative Peace” and “Positive Peace” criteria…
It gives me great pleasure to announce that the publishers of this blog and Kluwer Arbitration are hosting their first Webinar designed for corporate counsel on Wednesday 9th November (4pm Central European time/3pm UK time/10am Eastern Standard Time). The webinar is entitled Shell vs GE: The Employer-Contractor Debate. The Best Way to Resolve Conflicts and…
Desire. I have some transcripts from real-life family mediations to analyse and reading the transcripts, it struck me that I was reading about desire. This sent me back to my 1985 language, literature and culture textbook, Modern Literary Theory, and to psychoanalytic and linguistic theories. Thinking also about Nadja Alexander’s post about the Carlo Scarpa…
The importance of the multidisciplinary approach and the leading role of the parts. Modernity brought about the fragmentation of knowledge and the emergence of different disciplines as well as diversified specializations in several subject areas. This fragmentation enabled people to deepen their knowledge concerning specific issues and made them feel that they could master their…
Anyone who saw the 2010 Wimbledon match between Nicholas Mahut and John Isner would appreciate my feelings as I watched an almost endless play of wits during a recent energy deal in which I had been appointed as Transaction Counsel. Clearly, parties to the deals had their cards and kept playing it in a bid…
This morning I was greeted with the news that Julian Barnes’ The Sense of An Ending had been named this year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize. A wonderful read, in part about how our memory deceives us, it struck me as an appropriate point of departure for this blog post. Like Barnses’ narrator, “I…
