Mediation Practice

1. Failing to get the right people at the table. 2. Failing to explain the mediator's role as agent of reality. 3. Permitting settlement negotiations to begin prematurely - prior to permitting the…

Desire. I have some transcripts from real-life family mediations to analyse and reading the transcripts, it struck me that I was reading about desire. This sent me back to my 1985 language,…

This morning I was greeted with the news that Julian Barnes’ The Sense of An Ending had been named this year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize. A wonderful read, in part about how our memory deceives…

Last weekend I was entertained by the “progressive rock” group Caravan, a lesser known group of musicians, the peak of whose glory was 40 years ago, in 1971. These grey-haired men in their mid-60’s…

At their third mediation meeting, the parties reached an agreement in a dispute between family members over family property. The parties also seemed to settle older personal issues that apparently…

The Situation: Your client has brought a spouse or a significant other to the mediation who is having a problematic influence on your client’s decision-making abilities. This is preventing you from…

This post is dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs (1955-2011) [Author’s note: I had in mind another subject for this blog post. I was however moved to write this one. It seems fitting that I am…

They say that you can take the girl out of Australia but that you can’t take Australia out of the girl. So as an Australian living in Hong Kong, let me leave the east-meets-west stories for another…

I recently met an acquaintance of mine whom I have not seen for some time. He asked what I am doing, job wise. I replied that I am now doing mediation full time. “Oh,” he replied “do you do legal…