Mediation - Steady State, Big Bang or Black Hole?

In a paper of a speech given last year, mediator Tony Willis asks some provocative questions about mediation:

• Is it a profession? If so what are the consequences?
• What are its drivers?
• What is the relationship with the civil justice system?
• Is that relationship healthy?
• What is the external climate, and the current issues?
• Is there training sufficiency or oversupply?
• What of regulation, the role of the Civil Mediation Council, and judges as mediators...?
• Will we see more growth and if not why not?

He also puts forward a mediator's tentative manifesto.

If you wish to read the paper in full, please see download top right of page.

RICS wishes to thank Tony Willis (Brick Court Chambers) and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators for permission to reproduce this paper, which first appeared in (2006) 72 Arbitration 339-347.

Tony has been a full time Mediator for nearly a decade, having been Head of the Litigation practice at Clifford Chance in London for many years, practising as an independent mediator for six years after that. 

He then joined Brick Court Chambers as a mediator in 2004. He has conducted approximately 800 mediations on a wide range of commercial matters in this country and elsewhere in Europe and in the US.

He was for some years a Non Executive Director of CEDR and a member of their teaching faculty. He is a Fellow of the International Academy of Mediators, a founding member of the Panel of Independent Mediators and an elected member of the Civil Mediation Council. He consistently ranks at the top of the lists of mediators produced by Chambers Guide to the Legal Profession and the Legal 500.