A positive professional ideology for legal DR practice should incorporate a genuine fidelity to the good of DR. This ‘good’ derives from the values and goals of DR that are firmly situated within the framework of the rule of law in Australia’s Western liberal democracy. Core DR values include justice, party autonomy and community. Lawyers practising DR need to be professionally committed to working to realise these values across the matrix of DR processes, as they constitute an anchor of belief and perspective, and represent the grounding positive contribution that lawyers as DR practitioners make to society. DR values should influence professional lawyering and decision-making, guiding judgments as to what is acceptable and ethical. DR process goals — procedural and substantive justice, impartiality, self-determination and participation, and access to justice — represent the procedural objectives for putting such values into practice. Together DR values and goals provide the foundations of DR as a societal ‘good’, and form an ethical, just foundation for a positive professional ideology for lawyers.

Parties who seek the services of DR legal practitioners are almost always in a position where they are struggling to manage or resolve their disputes themselves. This is why they need access to legal DR expertise. They find themselves without the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to achieve effective dispute resolution, or conflict management, on their own. Being in dispute or conflict is often a difficult, stressful and disheartening time for people. Through a fidelity to the good of DR, lawyers not only contribute constructively to society but they can also achieve positive interpersonal and individual change for their clients. This positive impact has the potential to extend to healing, wholeness, harmony and optimal human functioning.

It is difficult to measure or quantify the exact actual benefit of DR practice for societal harmony, for legal certainty, for the quality of business and personal relationships, and for the well-being of citizens. It is nonetheless our contention that lawyers practising DR are, by putting the values and goals of DR into action, contributing to and sustaining, an inherent public good.

These thoughts have been adapted from Chapter 13 of Laurence Boulle and Rachael Field, Australian Dispute Resolution: Law and Practice (Lexis Nexis, 2017). We welcome your responses to them.

Laurence Boulle and Rachael Field

Acknowledgement of image: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=images+for+fidelity&rlz=1C1CHZL_enAU769AU769&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjF3sen79rdAhXY7WEKHdGNB5gQ7Al6BAgAEA0&biw=853&bih=386#imgdii=MAkGkWr9xEeZIM:&imgrc=EEsqx8d9gM18PM:

IN 2019 ADRJ WILL CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF PUBLISHING ADR ARTICLES

The Australasian Dispute Resolution Journal, published by Thomson Reuters (then Law Book Co), was a pioneer in venturing into the field of publishing academic articles relating to mediation. This came about through the efforts of the late Micheline Dewdney and Ruth Charlton, supported by ADRA and encouraged by the late Sir Laurence Street.

Sir Laurence contributed the first article for publication in February 1990 and remained till his death the Chief Editorial Consultant of the Journal. That article, still fresh and relevant today, is to be republished in Part 2 of Volume 28 as a tribute to his vast contribution to ADR.

Innovation and research continues to expand our knowledge in the broad field of dispute resolution. Thus the Journal would welcome the receipt of unpublished topical articles (up to 5000 words) and book reviews (up to 1000 words). All articles are peer reviewed.

Contributions should be emailed to the Thomson Reuters Editor at lta.adrj@thomsonreuters.com

Posted on behalf of Ruth Charlton

ADRJ Editor

While mediation has become a generic and ubiquitous brand it is worth recalling its 1980s Australian genesis in community justice programs throughout the country. Despite the contemporary preponderance of mediation within courts, tribunals, commissions and other legal institutions or legal contexts, the community justice programs have continued in less prominent forms and have increased their scope and services over time. While it is tempting to consider multiple future adaptions of mediation through replacement and disruptive technology and in many different dispute areas, it is appropriate to recognise the anchoring effect of its earliest community manifestations. While disruption (or, more positively, transformation) is a vogue concept of the age there is also a value in those who maintain the practice of traditional forms of mediation. While welcoming the inn

This is not, however, to pine wistfully for a return to mediation’s original intent and identity, as is sometimes heard at conferences. The system now has multiple intents and numerous identities; its future must be considered in the light of the present, and we reject an over-nostalgic view of mediation’s past. As we said in Australian Dispute Resolution, it is important to engage with ‘the discontinuities in the history of DR in Australia to help us learn from the past, avoid reinventing the wheel, remind us of the ideas and approaches that have been jettisoned, and appreciate why they have been discontinued or replaced’.

We hope you have enjoyed the series of posts from Chapter 12 of our new book Mediation in Australia (LexisNexis, 2018).

Laurence Boulle and Rachael Field

At a recent VADR presentation on Workplace Dispute Resolution, Fred Wright, Rodney McBride and Sue Ackerly spoke about their dispute resolution (DR) work with the public sector. Focussing on triage rather than direct DR processes, their work is data driven – this struck an immediate chord with me as it connects to my passion for evidence-based practice.

The findings of the 2010 State Services Authority’s implementation guide: Developing Conflict Resilient Workplaces and its companion guide for Managers and Teams were drivers of their work. These reports (part of the ‘Taking the heat out of workplace issues’ project) have inspired me to investigate the findings more closely.

This research holds interest for me, because it has a direct and strong connection to my work in DR. But the research has relevance and significance far beyond those of us practising in the DR field. It has something to say to every business – from the largest to the smallest. How many of these businesses (time poor like we all are) will make time to review the findings and explore their business relevance? I think we know the answer.

This is an important example of a broader issue and a recurring challenge.

Is it enough for us – dispute resolution (DR) academics, pracademics and practitioners – to investigate the research and share it with each other or should we be doing more? Do we have a responsibility to pass on this knowledge to the business community intimately affected by the findings? It is a question I see raised continually in research.

In particular, do we need to find a more accessible way to support businesses to recognise the need to deal with conflict early? Does that mean reconstructing how we approach education about DR processes?

The Report published Victorian State Services Authority

Today, eight years after the reports were first published, I wish to discuss three points.

1. What evidence do we have about implementation of the recommendations provided in the 2010 guides?

In the workplace environment, I have seen a move away from more adversarial, ‘grievance based’ processes (often triggered only when they have escalated to a point of ‘no return’), to promoting more informal processes (like conflict coaching, facilitation and mediation) to deal with workplace issues as an early intervention tool. This supports the triage process recommended in the Report.

This suggests to me that we are on the way.

2. How do we support those who are implementing these ideas to pass the message on to others?

Those organisations who understand the value of early intervention and support it together with more formal processes are a vital resource in education about the benefits of ADR. The DR community needs to provide them with evidence-based support and encouragement that they are ‘on the right track’. We can do this by continuing to collect data on the success of this existing research and publishing the findings. We can also showcase these businesses in case studies and success stories.

3. How do we promote these ideas to workplaces who are not yet on board?

The current business environment gives weight to and is influenced by evidence-based practice. Our community continually publish literature and presents at conferences about the benefits of ADR for other DR professionals. The blogposts available via the ADR Research Network are a significant example of how we provide accessible information about the benefits of the different available DR processes.

The question now is how to provide these to the wider community? The practitioners amongst us are sharing this information as part of the ADR processes and professional development we provide.

Many of us have access to other industries- either because of the focus of our research or because of the careers we held prior to entering the ADR space. Although some of you are already doing this, I encourage the rest of you not only ‘preach to the converted’, but to seek a wider audience with which to share your expertise.

For my own part, I plan to find an industry conference where the audience can be introduced to the value of early intervention through the evidence-based research in which my colleagues and I have been engaged.

I invite others to share their ideas about making ADR research accessible to the wider workforce.

Our series of posts from Chapter 12 of Laurence Boulle and Rachael Field, Mediation in Australia (LexisNexis, 2018) is almost at an end. This is our penultimate post:

The institutionalisation of mediation (discussed in Chapter 8 of Mediation in Australia is so central to the future of legal practice that (as we argued at some length in our other work Australian Dispute Resolution: Law and Practice (LexisNexis, 2017)) ‘it should also be central to every law graduate’s experience of legal education’. The recent nod to this position is the inclusion of DR in the core compulsory subject ‘Civil Procedure’ in the Priestley 11 subjects (the core compulsory subjects required for eligibility for admission to legal practice in Australia). Some in the mediation community, including some of our most esteemed colleagues in the ADR Research Network, see this as a positive and sufficient development. We agree that it is a positive development. However, we respectfully consider the approach to be insufficient.

In 2012 a national study by NADRAC found that only eight law schools at that time included in their curriculum a mandatory subject in which 50 per cent or more of the teaching focused on DR. The NADRAC Report made the point that ‘the amount of ADR teaching that currently occurs in the majority of Australian law schools is not sufficient in light of the increasing role that lawyers will play in advising clients about and assisting them in ADR processes’. At the time of writing, NADRAC’s successor — the Australian Dispute Resolution Advisory Council — is conducting a follow-up project led by Dr Kathy Douglas of RMIT. This new project will provide current, accurate and up-to-date nation-wide data about the presence of DR subjects in Australian law schools.

In our view, until that data reflects that every law school graduate has experienced a dedicated DR subject in their degree (including content on mediation theory and practice), the current Australian legal education system will be failing to adequately prepare law students to enter legal practice with the necessary knowledge, skills, attitudes and ethical attributes to enable them to succeed and thrive within and outside the profession in the 21st century. As long as DR is taught to future lawyers predominantly through elective subjects, it will be only those law graduates who have the acumen to choose DR as an elective who graduate with foundational levels of DR competence. The legal academy must support the work-readiness and future employability of students through DR education, if the legal profession is to have the capacity to manage positively the diverse challenges it faces into the future.

We welcome your comments and responses to these thoughts.

Laurence Boulle and Rachael Field

The new conceptualisation of mediation discussed in the previous post, inclusive of diverse practice, responsive, relational and ethically focused on the achievement of party self-determination in specific party contexts, will require ongoing evaluation and measurement of the extent to which the system does or does not live up to this recalibrated identity. Evaluation and measurement, both in absolute terms, and in comparison with other practices, will be critical for mediation’s future legitimacy and credibility, as it has been to the establishment of mediation’s current standing and acceptability in legal and social contexts.

However, the methods and approaches to how we evaluate mediation into the future will need to move past approaches with historical emphases on documenting settlement rates and satisfying statistical masters on time and resource factors. The profundity of methods for assessing mediation to date have been hampered by confidentiality, and by the confirmation bias associated with the need to establish mediation’s effectiveness and efficiency. Continued research is important into the future but will need to be more rigorous and sophisticated — to gauge the value of mediation in general as well as the efficacy of specific skills and interventions from the KSAE (the knowledge, skills, attitudes and ethics discussed previously).

More nuanced qualitative and interdisciplinary methodologies that explain the phenomenon of mediation more effectively will be necessary, such as narrative and phenomenographical methods, including approaches such as observation-based case studies, clinical reflective mediator practice, and individual anecdotes of existential experiences revealed through interviews and focus groups. Research design will include more variables and evaluation systems being built into the foundations of mediation programs to ensure more systematic collection of hard data and soft perceptions. Researchers and policy-makers will interrogate the problem of ‘what do we need to know about mediation’ more closely in order to design appropriate methods to extract the most useful and valid data. Researchers will also need to overcome confidentiality issues, look more critically at the quality of parties’ experiences, expose the shortcomings of mediation, evidence its diverse benefits and question the sustainability and justice of outcomes. Increased rigour in the measurement and evaluation of mediation and its bundle of attributes will better assist theory to meet practice and better inform policy development and the further institutionalisation of mediation.

In particular, we suggest that a closer evaluative eye is required on the operation of evaluative mediation, and the ability of evaluative mediators to achieve party self-determination ethically. It will be necessary to use research to ensure that if evaluative mediation becomes the normative approach, as well it might, that quality control and ethical frameworks exist to prevent rogue mediators making de facto determinations.

‘Forever learning’ is the potential mission statement of the mediation community into the future, as there is still much to be measured in, and understood about, mediation practice. Limitations in the ‘search for mediation knowledge’ will need to be overcome, and a deeper understanding of mediation practice will need to be revealed through a greater array of approaches and sources. Research efforts of greater depth and rigour will inform the future development of mediation’s bundle of attributes and micro-skills, as well as contribute to stronger awareness of the various pressures influencing and impacting the system. Understanding mediation is a long-term project for the mediation movement. Ultimately this understanding will contribute to mediation connecting more closely with the legal, social, economic and political contexts referred to in our previous posts.

We welcome your comments and responses to these thoughts.

Laurence Boulle and Rachael Field

Acknowledgement of images: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=images+for+evaluation&rlz=1C1CHZL_enAU769AU769&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiSpP3ekpvdAhWJdt4KHR_fDGwQsAR6BAgGEAE&biw=853&bih=357; https://www.shutterstock.com/search/evaluation?kw=&gclid=CjwKCAjw8ajcBRBSEiwAsSky_aHUdL8UeqEvanh81SIPbwLQOdKVIRBA7b_9no0Drcgc8SAZuTTy2BoCOfoQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds&dclid=CJCt2r-Wm90CFZYxKgodIl4Enw