Joint Sessions

  Offers in mediation are too often approached with all the coyness of gauche teenagers at a school dance (acknowledging that this metaphor may reveal too much about my own youth!). It need not be…

  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…

This is the first in a short series of how parties and advisers can best deploy the “assets” at their disposal in a mediation. Naturally, it is written from my perspective as a mediator, and so I…

  [Picture credit: creative commons]  Court cases are an important source of guidance for mediators, disputants and their lawyers. They remind us that the law casts a long shadow even when a…

Julian Baggini's recently published book "How the world thinks" is a history of global philosophy, looking at how thinking has developed in different places and times. In the introduction he…

  One of the privileges of mediating is to watch leaders at work. Every party, every team, has its leader(s). And as any mediator will tell you, the way in which they choose to lead during a…

Pollyanna/pɒlɪˈanə/ noun/an excessively cheerful or optimistic person. "what I am saying makes me sound like some ageing Pollyanna who just wants to pretend that all is sweetness and light" Every…

Bloomberg (not my usual reading fodder, I confess) carried an interesting piece a couple of months ago, entitled “Meet the Real Force Behind the Brexit Talks”. Yes, it was about Brexit (yawn) but it…

  Troubling trends observed as an Ontario commercial mediator compel me to once again take up my chiclet-keyed sabre. That the following are indeed trends in commercial mediation in Ontario is…