What we do

Disputes

Disputes can all too quickly and easily escalate into acrimonious, intractable feuds and lead to lengthy, complex litigation. However, GLEAMED has considerable experience in mediating Family, Workplace, Civil & Commercial, International and local Community disputes, often on neutral territory, to achieve an outcome that all parties can live with. A GLEAMED mediator engaging fully with all the parties and using tried and tested techniques will usually be able to facilitate the development of an acceptable agreement that will avoid the time, trouble and potentially very considerable expense of contested litigation.

Mediation Procedure

When you first contact GLEAMED we will ask you about the nature of your dispute and then allocate you to the appropriate pathway for handling it. There are some differences in the way family, workplace, civil/commercial, international and community mediations are handled and so each has its own pathway, involving a series of sequential steps. What follows is a general description of what happens - you can expect some minor variations, depending on the mature of your dispute. GLEAMED will, of course, ensure that you are quite clear about the process before setting out on it with you.

Ideally, before contacting GLEAMED, either you or your Solicitor will have obtained the agreement of the other party to mediation but if you would prefer, GLEAMED will approach the other party on your behalf.

For non-family mediation GLEAMED’s Managing Mediator will discuss the dispute with the parties so as to gain sufficient understanding to be able to select the best mediator to handle it. For family mediation, the referral is passed to the Family Mediator who then has an initial discussion with both sides in order to be able to assess whether the dispute is suitable for mediation.

Having discussed your dispute and allocated you to the appropriate handling pathway, GLEAMED will send you the necessary documents, including a Mediation Agreement which you must sign and return, together with a cheque for the costs quoted to you. GLEAMED’s Administrative Co-ordinator and the appointed Mediator will then work with you and any representatives/advisers you may have to finalise the arrangements.

The Mediation Agreement establishes the confidentiality of all proceedings, ensuring your privacy and making all offers and exchangers made during mediation “without prejudice” and not, therefore, subject to any subsequent disclosure.

Thereafter, the mediation will take place at the agreed time and place, and for the agreed duration. For non-family mediation, the Mediator will usually see the parties together initially and then talk to them separately; for family mediation the arrangements will depend on the circumstances and it may be that the parties are only seen separately.

The Mediator will explore with you the issues and difficulties in your dispute and the options for a settlement. Any information given to the Mediator will not be conveyed to anyone else without your express consent for the Mediator to do so. When an agreement is reached the Mediator will either facilitate arrangements by the parties and their solicitors/advisers to commit it to writing or, in the case of employment mediation and family mediation, the Mediator will complete the proscribed forms.

The mediation can be extended with the agreement of all concerned, by extra hours or days, either to continue mediation or allow those concerned to consider their positions. The mediation may also be suspended pending the provision of specialist input, e.g. by an Expert Witness. Conversely, if at any time the Mediator believes that any party is abusing the mediation process or otherwise concludes that there is unlikely to be a mutually acceptable outcome, the Mediator will inform the parties that the mediation has been terminated.
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You may have your solicitor or adviser present throughout the mediation but sometimes, parties do not wish to have representatives present, in which case our mediators will work with the individuals concerned on their own. Either way, the option remains for the parties to seek legal or other advice before entering into an agreement.

If appointed, one of your Adviser’s main tasks is to ensure you fully understand the nature of any agreement before you enter into it. They should also advise you on whether the agreement alone is sufficient, or whether it should be embodied as a court order, or some other steps taken to ensure that it takes effect.

The appointed Mediator will be provided in accordance with the Terms of Business that will be sent to you and with the arrangements set out in the Mediation Agreement that you must sign. If the Mediator we have offered and you have accepted should become unavailable for any reason, we will offer you another but you may withdraw at this stage if you feel they are not ideal and all monies paid will be refunded. If you cancel the mediation then a proportion of the monies paid may be refunded, depending on how much notice is given.

Conflict Resolution: prevention, management and settlement

More widely, many of our Mediators have been involved in conflict and dispute resolution around the world and are now working in collaboration with The Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution at Essex University to help prevent, manage and settle conflicts, and contribute to justice and reconciliation during the transition to democracy thereafter.

To resolve a conflict, Mediators need to address the underlying issues and the interests of the parties to find win-win outcomes rather than seeking ways to impose an unacceptable win-lose solution. This is especially relevant where conflict is being used quite deliberately as an instrument for change, especially for political, organisational, personal or other social engineering purposes. In these cases, resolution occurs by listening to and providing opportunities for meeting the needs of all disputants, and by finding acceptable ways of adequately addressing their interests so that each party is satisfied with the outcome.

While 'conflict resolution' engages conflict once it has already started, 'conflict prevention' aims to reconcile disputants before their disagreements lead to verbal, physical, or legal fighting or even violence. Mediators can be particularly helpful when coalitions, consortia or other groupings are coming together and each participant is concerned to protect their own interests whilst having insufficient regard for those of others and also potentially unrealistic expectations of the benefits of their collaboration. A neutral third party (the Mediator) can delve into these areas with each participant and help them to identify their mutual benefits and constraints, leading to realistic expectations, clarity of roles and responsibilities and a framework/contract/governance regime that embeds arrangements they can all agree to.

Conflict or dispute management is useful for dealing with a ‘flare-up’ with its origins in a long-running underlying dispute that neither side is yet ready to settle. Over time, the precedents and arrangements arrived at in settling these local ‘flare-ups’ can contribute to the development of a wider settlement for part of or even the entire underlying dispute. However, whilst Mediators will need to keep the underlying issues in mind when dealing with a ‘flare-up’, their focus must remain on resolving the immediate dispute so as to prevent the situation getting worse. In the process, they can, of course, take any opportunity to address the wider issues but must remain alert to the danger of getting diverted from achieving a speedy resolution of the immediate problem in the process.

Our Mediators work on conflict and dispute resolution in many arenas - internationally, commercially, in the workplace, in families and in the community. In doing so, they draw on their extensive experience as mediators to facilitate the development of settlements, including the arrangements for their implementation, that are acceptable to all the parties concerned.