Joy Davies looks to the next 20 years of civil & commercial mediation
It is increasingly difficult to answer the question about the future of UK civil and commercial mediation given the surprising developments in the promotion of mediation as a method of dispute resolution during the last 10 years. It could go one of two ways: (i) judicial and government-led compulsion or (ii) a return to grass-roots level with control being returned to the end user. The Access to Justice Report, government pledges, judicial decisions, alternative dispute resoltuion service providers, the Civil Mediation Council and court mediation schemes have, during this period, been both allies and competitors for the position to control or influence the agenda for the development of what currently appears to be a market for mediation that is static.
What happened to the development of this exciting, new, interesting, practical and commercial method of resolving disputes that began filtering into legal practice 20 years ago?
Have the detractors who thought mediation to be inappropriate, unsophisticated, hit and miss, a threat to income, won popularity?
Has the whole debate about mediation become
