A number of recent mediations have reaffirmed some essentials which I share here in the hope that they might be helpful to others: It’s not all about the money. Mr A had a very substantial claim against a bank running into hundreds of thousands of pounds Sterling, most of his life savings. When I asked…

Mediation has found increased statutory recognition in India and the legislature has recently introduced it in the Companies Act 2013, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016, as well as the Commercial Courts Act 2015, among others. Two separate updates from the Supreme Court of India this month have engaged the Indian community in the discussion…

The forthcoming Singapore Mediation Convention aims at ensuring the international “direct” enforcement of Mediated Settlement Agreements (“MSAs”) worldwide (see the post by Nadja Alexander, on a short description of the Convention). This means that an MSA shall be enforced directly in any Singapore Mediation Convention contracting state, without a prior review or granting of enforcing…

This post, the second of a two-part series, examines further potential problems of implementing the Singapore Mediation Convention in China and proposes corresponding solutions. The first post in this series considered three potential problems and this second post examines four further potential problems. 4. The SPC should establish an annual reporting system for cases pertaining…

On January 25th 2019 Brazil experienced its largest industrial catastrophe, the collapse of a dam from Vale, one of the world’s largest Mining Company. The disaster devastated the town of Brumadinho, in Minas Gerais. It was of such magnitude that, until March 8th, the day I write this post, there were 193 confirmed deaths and…

On June 26, 2018, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) approved the final draft of the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (“Singapore Mediation Convention” or “the Convention”) at its fifty-first session. The Convention aims to promote international commercial mediation, and to establish a mechanism for the direct…

“If you had not held us back that evening, the deal would not have been done.” “Thank you and I wish you well.” In this post, I return to a familiar theme for mediators and for lawyers acting for clients in mediation: perseverance. The first of the two quotations above comes from a participant in…

I wish to add to Michael Leathes’ recent post on his suggestion that more field-based research be done into the mediation product and Rick Weiler’s follow-up. There are really two distinct questions here. One relates to whether, with enough real-world research, we can put mediation in a nice box with a ribbon around it and…

This post is part of a series on the UN Convention on Mediated Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (the Singapore Convention on Mediation). In previous posts we have outlined the conventional view that Article 5 of the Singapore Convention establishes exhaustively all the possible exceptions to the enforcement of iMSAs that have otherwise have complied…

(Written with Advocate Karleen De Mello, Goa, India) I was recently witness to a mediation session during which two seasoned negotiators behaved disappointingly. Why? On the other side was a negotiator, who walked in with a cane, accompanied by her lawyer. From the outset, these two experienced negotiators behaved very awkwardly at the table, with one…