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...
Also at the UIA Forum in Amsterdam, a panel on “Med/Arb: Myth or Reality!” was offered, complete with exclamation mark. The panelists were from the US and the UK, which seemed odd inasmuch as I had understood that the practice of med/arb -- that is, of wearing more than one...
The 21st meeting of the UIA’s World Forum of Mediation Centers took place in beautiful Amsterdam on June 5 and 6, 2015. Co-Presidents Fabienne van der Vleugel and Colin Wall welcomed delegates mainly from Europe and the United States. The first topic discussed was the use of mediation in public...
The recent issue of The Business Lawyer, a publication of the ABA Business Law Section, addresses a topic of particular interest: "the hard choices that face a general counsel when weighing the pros and cons of whether and when a particular complex business dispute is better suited for litigation in...
Its first attempt having been stricken by the Third Circuit, the Delaware General Assembly recently enacted the Delaware Rapid Arbitration Act that seems ideally suited to a broad range of business disputes, and is a welcome contribution to rational, reasonable and responsive arbitration law. Among its features, the Act requires that...