Wendy Kamenshine, Ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau office, along with her colleague Sharon Asar, conducted an interesting presentation at the recent ABA Business Law Section Annual Meeting on the role of the Ombudsman office at the CFPB. The role of the office is to advocate for a fair process...
A recent trip to Turkey included a delightful visit at the offices of leading Turkish law firm Hergüner Bilgen Özeke and several of its members, including H. Tolga Danisman. Tolga and I met in the most recent convening of the UIA World Mediation Forum, in Amsterdam, and it was a...
Larson Frisby, of the ABA Governmental Affairs Office, recently offered an update on the status of federal ADR legislation and other related measures. Some of the most interesting proposals are briefly described below. ...
My admiration for Walt Kelly has recently developed into an obsession, and over the past few years I have been gobbling up each volume of The Complete Pogo as it has trundled off the presses. Churchy, Mam'selle Hepzibah, Albert and Pup Dog not being that far from my mind, the...
The death of Colin J. Wall on July 16, 2015, is a crushing blow to our profession and a personal loss to me. Colin was not a lawyer. He was trained as a quantity surveyor, which (as he explained it to me) meant that he was good a figuring out what...
Unmarketed, unheralded, and therefore largely unknown are the Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators, promulgated in 2005 by the ABA Dispute Resolution Section, the AAA and ACR. Even less well-known, one suspects, are the opinions of the Committee on Mediator Ethical Guidance that issue periodically interpreting those Standards. Two recent...
In the final report from the June 2015 convening of the UIA World Mediation Forum, Elena Koltsaki of Thessalonia, Greece, led a panel addressing online dispute resolution (ODR) from an EU perspective. She noted two principles at the outset: First, a central goal of EU regulation is consumer protection and the...