Question How long it takes before your average mediation is concluded? You may have experience with the mediation process as a mediator, party, advisor, or referral. Or not, and you may simply wonder how much time is needed for a mediation process to be concluded. Theory and practice It’s interesting if we think about the…
As I have proudly published in several articles last year, Brazil has come a long way until it finally managed get its first Mediation Law into force. Find below a brief historic to remember this path: • 2004 – Start of the Judiciary Reform • 2010 – Ordinance No. 125 creates the National Judiciary Policy…
(This is a ‘letter to self’ about court ADR research sent from the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Conference, San Francisco, April 2017.) Do Litigants Know Their Options? It’s always fascinating to come to a country where mediation is business as usual. There are some downsides to this, but the upside that immediately strikes a…
Always on the lookout for new books on mediation, for myself and my students of conflict and mediation, every now and then I come across one which is not actually new and I wonder how I missed it and what I ever did without it. One such book is Ellen Waldman’s 2011 gem on the…
It was fifty years ago at the end of May that the Beatles launched the album (or LP as it was then called) “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on the world – and the world was changed forever. 1967 was quite a year. It was the “Summer of Love”. Revolution was in the air…
I recently carried out New Zealand’s first empirical research on the users of commercial mediation. This is Part Three of a three-part study (Part One = the mediators, Part Two = the gatekeepers/lawyers). Getting to grips with what users think of commercial mediation is the Holy Grail for mediation professionals. Until now in New Zealand,…
This post is in part a roundabout response to Constantin-Adi Gavrila’s recent Kluwer mediation blog, in which he writes about a conversation with a friend who was convinced that all mediators need to be lawyers. The argument goes that to mediate you need to be a qualified lawyer, have legal knowledge of the disputed matter,…
Have you ever wondered who mediators are helping? The parties, obviously! Well, not so obvious to our critics. In this blog I consider worries about mediation’s approach to manifest injustice before making the case for understanding the mediator as co-creator, with the parties, of outcomes. I argue that co-creation enhances the prospects for justice. Stories…
Speaking recently with a lawyer friend about the way that mediation is impacting the traditional justice mechanisms, I was happy to observe more openness towards ADR than the usual “allergy to it”, yet the honest reply included “[…] unfortunately, not only lawyers can provide mediation services, and this will hurt the quality”. Of course, this…
In July 2014, my Kluwer Blog entry introduced readers to something referred to as “A Mediator’s Prayer”. It was created by Mr. Ting-Kwok IU, a lawyer and mediator based in Hong Kong. I first met TK in Hong Kong at the 3rd Asian Mediation Association Conference in 2014. TK is a humble and unassuming man…
