Legal Practice

  Mediation has long been used as a method of resolving disputes. Indeed, the practice of combining mediation and arbitration by the same neutral has been traced back to ancient Greece and Ptolemaic…

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…

Are agreements to mediate enforceable? The short (and incomplete) answer is: yes, they may be provided they are drafted appropriately. In this post we review a recent English judgment which sets outs…

The Singapore Convention on Mediation makes clear that international mediated settlement agreements (iMSAs) may be used as a sword or invoked as a shield in judicial or arbitral proceedings (defence)…

Is this yet another case in which New York is setting global trends? By the end of the year, the state courts in New York are due to have a system in place requiring that civil and commercial…

(This post is being republished due to technical issues when it was first published.) “I see contemporary patterns of disputing as an adaptive (but not necessarily optimal) response to a set of…

  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…

As Chip and Dan Heath describe in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, we are rational beings with a “Rider” that logically analyzes our surroundings. Our Rider tries to…

While I am watching hailstones the size of peas fall in the West of Ireland, a good number of my colleagues are celebrating the culmination of the ICC's Mediation Competition in Paris, where in…