Mediation succeeds in disputes where previous attempts have failed because, when you bring together the right people at the right time, the environment for decision-making is positively transformed. The parties and their professional advisors, including those with authority to make or influence a decision, meet in the same place at the same time, and the ‘correspondence’ between the parties is accelerated. That immediacy of information exchange, the opportunity to see reactions (and explore the reasoning or motivation behind them), and the without-prejudice nature of communication (and option generation), all create a new dynamic better suited to decision-making. Add to that the independence and skills of the mediator, and you have an effective environment for negotiating an agreement.

What the pandemic and physical distancing have achieved is a mass learning event in how to use online platforms to hold effective meetings. Now, we have more choices because of broader acceptance and confidence in using online meeting platforms, across all age groups. The providers of conferencing platforms have been remarkably responsive to implementing features, and some are particularly useful for mediation.

I have been an enthusiastic user of Zoom for mediations for many years. I prefer Zoom because it offers the closest thing on the market to an in-person mediation. Over the last few months, Zoom has made many improvements to enhance security, the flexibility of breakout rooms and screen sharing. The latest release (5.3) offers a new feature which allows the host (the mediator) to rearrange the participants in gallery view so that parties are usefully grouped: a small and reassuring feature for mediators, for whom allocating parties to the wrong rooms is an unbearable ‘fail’.

Read original article


Tags: