Manon@ToolkitCompany.com
Making & Sustaining Deals
Blog
I'm currently on vacation in France. Lovely place, but little wifi.
The 4th International Summer School of Business Mediation in
Admont Austria just finished. The Summer School was a most wonderful experience, with many colleagues from all around the world, old and now new friends. We dealt in depth with issues like cross border mediations, cultural aspects, special issues dealing with the construction industry and banking. But also fascinating interdisciplinary topics like hypnotherapy and mediation, neurobiology and decision making, as well as constellations in mediation and meditation and mindfullness. The absolute highlights of this incredible event were:- Workshops by JAMS mediator Dan Weinstein, who described how he and his team of among others Liz Hasse, mediated large high stake cases like the Parmalat case and Enron, as well as juicy mediations in a Hollywood setting.
- Having a tea ceremony with Vivian Feng and Andrew Lee of the Leading Negotiation Institute in Bejing, China. As well as Andrews incredible German speech.
- Applying constellations to mediation settings by Mathias Varga von Kibeth and his lovely wife Insa Sparrer.
- And of course the heart beat event and oriental dance workshop by Noura Latiff.
The next summer school will be in July 2012. Can't wait. Presentations from the workshops that I delivered are dowloadable in the resources section.
BREAKING NEWS:
Merger between business mediation providers Result ADR and ACB to
Result ACB. And Midsummer briefing by Dan Weinstein in Amsterdam on
July 20, 17.00 Sheraton, Schiphol.
During the Deutsche Anwaltvereinstagung in Aachen (Germany), end of May, we discussed the status of the implementations of the Mediation directive in several European countries. There were great speakers in the panel who gave an consise overview of how the directive is handled in their respective countries. One of the most striking new learnings for me was that in France (Grenoble) there has been research into the effectiveness of lawyers representing their clients in court connected mediation as opposed to non represented clients. The outcome is that 2/3 of the cases with lawyers settled as opposed to 1/3 of cases without any legal representation. The conclusion based on this is that lawyers can really add value to the quality of the process and outcomes of mediation. More to follow on this after I've received the survey!
Ken Fox of Hamline University, Esra Escuhadar of Bilkent University and I have been working very hard on our article to describe our experiences while testing out negotiation 2.0. teaching methods in Istanbul, based on the 3-year project 'Rethinking Negotiation Teaching (NT 2.0. project) of Hamline University. This article, together with many morecontributions of the participants of the project, will be published and downloadable from Hamline's website soon.
Next coming up is the Third European Conference on Mediation, May 27 & 28, 2010 in Paris.
International
Committee ABA Dispute Resolution Section, Meeting. April 7
San
Francisco, CA, USA
As the Co-Chairs of the International
Committee of ABA’s Dispute Resolution Section, Jeremy Lack
(Altenburger, Geneva) and I
organized a kick-off event of our renewed committee (see:
DR
Meeting 2010.).
More
than 50 of our committee members joined us for a very useful meeting
where we brainstormed and laid the base for the future activities of
our committee. As an added incentive
there was a great
workshop of
Professor Hal
Abramson’s on: "How to mediate and negotiate effectively in any
country or culture", based on his new book Mediation
Representation: Advocating as a Problem-Solver in Any Country or
Culture.
We're very excited to implement the next steps for our active
committe and just finalized a report in which we capture
all ideas. If you are also interested in becoming a member of ABA's
International Committe of the Dispute Resolution Section, or receive
the report, you can do
so by sending
an e-mail to David Moora at
moorad@staff.abanet.org.
Video Project Mediation Advocacy:
SPECIAL CHEMISTRY
On our way to the ABA Spring conference Prof. Hal Abramson and I
made a stop-over at Hamline University where we produced in
co-production with Sharon Press, Director of the Dispute Resolution
Institute of Hamline University school of law, two videos on representing clients in a commercial cross border
mediation: a 30 minutes caucus style mediation as well
as a 30 minute joint session mediation. I was the was impressed by the fabulous work of the actors and the film
crew. We're currently editing the videomaterial. The video with the
case of 'Special Chemistry' will be downloadable for free and
will also be added to Prof Abramsons new book
on teaching mediaton representation.
Conference on Preventive mediation in Utrecht
on April 20
Utrecht University and Hoge School Utrecht co-organize a
conference on preventive
mediation with the
EU sponsored
project Lawyers in ADR on April 20. I
did a workshop
where I challenge the work of a Deal-Maker vs. a Deal-Mediator/Facilitator: the topic of
my PhD. The workshop charts are downloadable in the resources
section. The new book in the conference series of Utrecht
University and HU 'Preventive mediation' was also launched during
this event.
Farewell celebration of John Bosnak as
President of NVVMA on April 22 on Lawyers and ADR in Utrecht
A great program with interesting speakers, organized together with
Utrecht University as part of the Lawyers in ADR project. As surpise
ghuest Jeremy from Switzerland and Hal Abramson from New York joined
via Skype to add to the festivities (beards, hats and red scarfs
played the lead role in this). Hereunder some photo impressions.
