Decision making

While it is obvious that law is significant in legal disputes, how the law is used is not so obvious. This piece uses Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous definition of the law as “prophecies of what the…

I was puzzled to get an email from a mediator thanking me for my recent post, which advocated using a unified conceptual framework of unbundled mediation interventions. The puzzling part was that she…

A quarter century ago, Professor Leonard Riskin published an article describing a grid of mediator orientiations including a facilitative-evaluative dimension.  Despite critiques of this framework,…

“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…

I write this in the aftermath of yet another mediation in which the protagonists exhibited symptoms of having been seriously traumatised by the litigation process to which they had been exposed…

'The world is made, not found' (W. Barnett Pearce) (1) I just spent an intensive weekend on Zoom with my students, helping them navigate their early steps into mediation practice. So much has…

"The grandchildren put out a treble tongue, Law is the senses of the young" W H Auden, "Law like Love" “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds…

Introduction "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." William James Whether as mediators, advisors or parties in dispute, we consider ourselves…

  Mediation can be an intense experience for parties and their advisers. Often there is a lot on the line. In the substance there may be money, control, reputation, pride. In the process, there…