Not that the ADR is a boring milieu, but given the time of the year and the number of official and unofficial holidays the dispute resolution practitioners are taking right now, I have decided to step out from the line when writing this blog post. With the end of the summer approaching, enjoy a bit…

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am exercised by the question of justice in mediation. I test the concept on people I meet; responses range from “that’s an interesting idea” to “it has nothing whatever to do with it”. At a conference earlier this year a senior lawyer claimed he could count…

It is the beginning of the school term at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, where in this semester, I teach a Negotiation Workshop. In our first class yesterday, we played a pricing game based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. There are many versions of this pricing game and it essentially introduces participants to…

The saying “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” is one of the most famous taglines in modern tourism, meaning ….. well, you probably know what it means, don’t you ? However, differently from the Vegas perspective, my recent experience in Vienna is one that I definitely want to share with you. In a week…

In Buenos Aires, the city where I currently practice mediation, mediation is mandatory before suing the other party. Thanks to this system, I was able to start mediating my first cases right after I was certified. After a few cases, however, I began to realize just how overwhelming it can be when parties’ advocates are…

I like mediating. I also like running marathons. What this says about my sanity is a question for another day, but the more I do both the more similarities I identify between the two disciplines. A recent week of particularly arduous mediation brought these similarities to mind more than usual. Preparation, of course, is the…

This week, I have had the genuine privilege of contributing one of the key note addresses at the Annual Conference of the Arbitrators and Mediators Institute of New Zealand (AMINZ) in Wellington. It has been a terrific conference, superbly organized by the indefatigable Deborah Hart. The standard of the many and diverse sessions has been…

With the summer going on, many mediation practitioners are enjoying well deserved holidays. Yet for some of them, even this period of year is time for some pondering over dispute resolution. Should you be one of them, you may find the story of two half-brothers in ancient Greece as an interesting hint. This is the…

I am a young Lebanese graduate in mediation and currently training to practice in Paris. I frequently get asked the following questions: What is the mediation situation in the Middle East? Is it because your country is a non-mediation country that you are training in Europe? What is the mediation situation in the Middle East?…