The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (“SIDRA”) issued the global International Dispute Resolution Survey: 2020 Final Report (the “SIDRA Survey”) on 3 July 2020, which studied the preferences, experiences, and perspectives of legal users (lawyers and legal advisers) and client users (corporate executives and in-house counsel) with regard to, among other mechanisms, international commercial mediation….

For readers who are new, the “Neuro-Linguist’s Toolbox” series is an ongoing series focused on using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) in our practice of amicable dispute resolution. The first section focused on rapport (the first of which can be found here). The second section focuses on matters of self-care and personal improvement for mediators (the first…

University of Strathclyde, host to Learning by Doing, mediation clinic conference

By the everyday miracle of Zoom, Carrie Menkel-Meadow spoke from her LA office to a Glasgow conference with a worldwide audience. Wrapping up ‘Learning by Doing,’ the UK’s first conference devoted to mediation clinics, her keynote described the inspiration for a whole career: a colleague in her legal aid office in the 1970s. While Carrie…

ICC’s biggest educational event of the year, its International Mediation Competition, took place from 5 to 11 February 2021 and, for the first time of its history, it was conducted online. It was its 16th edition and 48 universities from 39 countries competed online, via a dedicated platform. It has been an opportunity for us,…

” . . . how are we to deal with this grief? People might react with despair, sadness, frustration, lack of control, hopelessness, and even apathy. It’s understandable, given the enormity of the destruction taking place. It’s understandable to feel powerless when faced with the news of another whale dying, another forest being decimated, or…

Since so much communication at work and home has gone online through the Covid lockdowns we have been witnessing a whole new vocabulary of everyday life. As much of this communication is likely to stay online, it pays to take a critical look at the vocabulary we are using. It is fairly straightforward to find…

Given the confidential nature of mediation, it is a rare set of circumstances that allow us to catch a glimpse into the mediator’s craft. The current review of the professional standards governing Australia’s accredited mediators provides one such opportunity, The review seeks, to the extent permissible, to uncover what practitioners are actually doing, including the…

On 29 January 2021, the European Union and Canada adopted four decisions providing for specific rules regarding the Investment Court System (“ICS”) agreed in the 2016 EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (“CETA”). One of them includes the Rules for Mediation. See: general facts about CETA. The CETA was signed on 30 October 2016, and…

Given Peter Drucker’s memorable observation, how valuable an asset is trust in shaping a culture? What role could mediators play in strengthening it? From a purely economic perspective there appears to be a strong relationship between levels of trust and output per head (as the chart below from ‘Our World in Data’ demonstrates). As with…

“Managing a Client’s expectations and advising them on a course of action turned out to be far more difficult than negotiating with the other Party.” So wrote newly-minted Indian lawyer Varsha Manoj about her experiences negotiating with her clients. Many lawyers in the US and other countries undoubtedly have similar experiences. Legal clients often experience…