Gregory Hunt

Finally it’s today and the first Hunt ADR training event is on! We’ve been stopped by the ‘Beast from the East’ and we were stopped by trainer illness, but, at last, we find ourselves going live!

It’s the Brits tonight! This reminds me of a few ADR related stories I have to do with the music industry.  This is not related to my blog “Applying Mediator Skills Where There is no Dispute” which included an extensive (mainly Indie) playlist.

“Mediation is a flexible and consensual technique in which a neutral facility helps the parties reach a negotiated settlement of their dispute. The parties have control over the decision to settle and the terms of any agreement. Settlements are contractually binding and widely enforceable.”

The full course will include pragmatic steps to help delegates towards being a practising mediator, with a carefully blended programme of theory and role playing to develop and apply all the relevant skills needed to be a successful mediator. CPD will be open to all with the additional development of the “CPD Club”, which provides member mediators with a variety of events tailored to achieve CMC CPD points to allow them to continue to practice under the CMC banner.

These were the first cases where I have encouraged, based on the parties and the atmosphere on the day, to try and keep the parties together throughout. I’ve been sceptical of this in the past, not least because conventional training tends to promote the use of joint opening session and then splitting for private sessions.

The impact is that the key battleground for customer loyalty is now complaints. If consumers at best are happy to self-manage and at worst are discouraged from contacting, then when a real issue arises, it becomes the only point after purchase that a customer really has to engage with a business.

I first became aware of LawBite through its founder and CEO, Clive Rich. Clive, author of “The Yes Book” and “Law for Small Business for Dummies” was a coach on the CEDR Advanced Negotiation training programme, and shortly afterwards became my business mentor.  He set LawBite up to be different – to be accessible, reassuring and cost-effective – it was easy to join him and to live by these values.

The session was chaired by outgoing ELI President, the esteemed Diana Wallis, and included contributions from Tiina Astola (Director-General for Justice and Consumers at the European Commission), Naomi Creutzfeldt (Senior Lecturer, The University of Westminster), Felicitas Paller (a judge of the Vienna Commercial Court) and Sir Geoffrey Vos QC (Chancellor of the High Court).

My latest guest blog comes from Executive Chairman at Pengaron Mediation Services Ltd, Dave Owen.  Dave is well known to most in the mediation community, and in this blog he outlines several cases that reached court where mediation would surely have been a preferable way of resolving the dispute.  All cases described by Dave have been reported in the national press.

The alternative these days is to go to law. If you go to law, you will spend your time firmly in the past and risk emerging with no future at all. You will look at what happened and fixate on it, rather than what the best solutions are to fix the problem and, in the case of many business disputes, work out a way that you can continue to work together.