Mediator Charlie Irvine makes the case for online dispute resolution in a recent post on the Kluwer Mediation Blog. “If precedent is anything to go by, it would be foolish to bet against the forward march of technology,” he says, and urges mediators and their clients alike to move past the “gold standard” of face time and explore other arrangements, such as video chatting on FaceTime.
Irvine says his first foray into the virtual mediation space was conducting a one-hour workplace mediation simulation. The downsides were what you would imagine: technical difficulties can disrupt the entire process, slight delays when using Skype and body language that doesn’t translate digitally, such as hand gestures.
