Greg Rooney

(Part II of Greg’s blog following from last week’s Part I)

In response to the challenge of trying to provide value to the new collaborative economy the legal profession has sought to rebrand itself to try to recover commercial relevance. It has looked to the trusted mediation movement as its path to restoring that lost trust. The legal profession has sought to rebadge itself by dumping the designation “litigators” and replacing it with “Dispute Resolvers” (DR) now with lofty ideals:

“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.” (Boulle and Field) (1)

It is ironic that the long-term criticism of traditional mediation by the legal profession has been that it is too ‘touchy-feely’ and into “healing, wholeness, harmony and optimal human functioning” the very thing that it is now trying to champion DR as.

The proponents of the DR push have gone much further than a simple rebranding exercise. They have chosen to question and diminish the intent and identity of the traditional mediation movement.

Firstly, Boulle and Field (1) suggest that despite mediation’s versatility and diversity of applications it is not clear how mediation will respond to the challenges ahead. Secondly, they suggest it follows that this uncertainty for the future somehow renders mediation vulnerable to being subverted, rejected and replaced or modified beyond recognition.  They then conclude that because of this uncertainty for the future we should not pine for or have nostalgic sentiment for mediation’s (presumably lost or invalid) original intent and identity.

The real intent of the Dispute Resolution movement is revealed by the assertion that:

“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.”  (Highlights inserted) Boulle and Field (1)

The recent Global Pound conferences were essentially a public relations exercise to pursue this end. It is the promotion of evaluative mediation and allied semi-determinative processes as the pre-eminent conflict resolution process by, in part, commandeering the high value of mediation in the eyes of the community. I am not sure the commercial world is buying this makeover, particularly when it still built on an adversarial solution focused culture that is not in harmony with modern economic drivers.

I would argue that the traditional non-evaluative ‘process’ approach to mediation is far more in tune with the modern collaborative economy. It is an experiential approach which gives the parties the time and space to step back and allow patterns to emerge. The mediator can sense and respond to these patterns.  This creates the potential for new opportunities to emerge out of the interaction that can lead to innovation and creativity. It can help repair disrupted trust which is the central foundation of the modern economy. It is mediating for the emergence of the new rather than providing an evaluation of the parties’ respective positions in order to close the gap.

The core facilitative skills that mediators acquire through the practice of sensing and responding to the immediacy of the moment equip them with the exact soft skills that the commercial world needs to manage in this complex environment. This is reflected in the fact that most MBA courses run throughout Australia have now been redesigned to incorporate soft skills as a core component of their coursework. Further, the big four accounting firms have created legal departments based on a collaborative non-litigious approach to providing legal expertise.

1. Future mediation: A flexible bundle of knowledge, skills, attitudes and ethical attributes  Posted on 24/08/2018 by Dr Rachael Field.  Excerpts from Laurence Boulle and Rachael Field, from Mediation in Australia (LexisNexis, 2018)

(This is Part II of Greg’s three part series.)

Greg Rooney has been a mediator in private practice in Australia for 27 years and has since 1995 taught mediation and allied ADR subjects in a number of universities and private institutions in Australia and internationally. Greg has over the last 14 years mediated over 200 face-to-face meetings between religious leaders and individual victims of sexual abuse within a number of Christian religious institutions in Australia as well as abuse within the Australian Defence Force and the South Australian Police Force. Greg, together with colleagues Margaret Ross and Barbara Wilson, have since 2012 run an annual Mediation Retreat in Tuscany, Italy.  www.gregrooney.com.au

In just a few weeks, the three pillars of Australia’s financial dispute resolution architecture will be rolled into a single new body – the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA).

From 1 November 2019, AFCA will replace the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), the Credit and Investments Ombudsman (CIO) and Superannuation Complaints Tribunal (SCT).

As the AFCA website explains, the body will be funded by its members – i.e. Australian financial providers – with the amount payable by a particular provider being a combination of a base subscription and usage based charges.  This is a mechanism common to industry-funded schemes, and is designed to promote effective internal dispute resolution by providers, and ensures that complainants (consumers and small businesses) can access the scheme free of charge.

The jurisdiction and powers of AFCA are set out in its Scheme Rules.  One notable, and beneficial, feature of AFCA is its power to deal with systemic complaints alongside individual disputes, to order that changes be made, and to report AFCA’s findings to government bodies such as ASIC, the ATO and APRA (the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority).

Dispute resolution practitioners may also be interested to know that AFCA has advertised a number of positions at various levels in both Sydney and Melbourne.  Details here.

Image:  Pixabay, licensed for free commercial reuse.

by Greg Rooney

Mediation has an identity issue – but it’s not its fault.

Mediators – and the profession they practise called mediation – merely sit as innocent bystanders observing how the modern collaborative interconnected economy has challenged the identity and, in some cases, the very existence of the established professions and commercial and social institutions.

We now live in a time where a world of connectivity and fluidity has replaced the 20^th– century Newtonian concepts that are linear, predictable and deterministic.  This is a world driven by the rise of the World Wide Web in 1990, powered by the Google search engine in 1996 and the power of social networking starting with Facebook in 2004.

The world dramatically changed again in 2007 when Napster introduced the first sharing platform heralding the beginning of the collaborative sharing economy.  Then came Airbnb and Uber, both in 2008.  We now have transparent and open data networks that are available free of charge to anyone with an Internet connection.

The latest iteration in this change is the development of the ‘Internet of Things’ which is a network of physical devices, including vehicles, home appliances and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators and connectivity, which enables these things to connect with each other and exchange data. As an example Uber’s computers share traffic data with Google Maps computers.

The complexity caused by this connectivity has upended the Newtonian concept that the world is ordered and measurable and that having knowledge of the past will allow a computation of the future.  Many organisations and professions, including the legal profession, still rely on a fixed Newtonian view of the world and wonder why they are being disrupted to their detriment.

The biggest upheaval has been the rise in the commercial value of trust over that of competitive and adversarial behaviours.  The sharing economy relies on the willingness of users to be trustworthy and to trust each other.  The platforms themselves also must be trustworthy. The sharing economy is built on the human element which is inherently complex. It is therefore essential that any conflict be dealt with in a way that preserves those trusting relationships while allowing new learnings which are an essential springboard for innovation and evolutionary breakthroughs.

We therefore require a new way of thinking and operating that can work with this complexity.

This new world order accurately describes the lot of the practising mediator. Mediators around the world will go off to work tomorrow morning and engage with parties at a very human level in much the same way as they have been doing since the late 1980s.  They will work with the uncertainties of the conflict they are mediating and hopefully come up with ‘good enough’ resolutions.  They will continue to deal with complexity and ambiguity daily and use their soft skills to massage impasses and blockages. These ‘soft’ skills are now in high demand in the commercial world.

It is the established professions and the commercial and social institutions that are having the identity crisis. They are in a scramble to find meaning and understanding to try to fit in with this new reality.

No profession is more under threat from this new world order than the legal profession.

Since the 1980s it has moved from being a trusted profession based on the application of scale costs, which moderated the profession’s financial self-interest, to a commercial business model built on time costing to maximise dollar return through promoting (litigation finance) and extending disputes by means of the adversarial culture. The problem is not so much the high legal fees, although it is an issue, it is the pursuit of the adversarial approach to drive those extra fees. This keeps their clients stuck in the conflict zone far longer than is commercially necessary. This has turned out to be a huge self-inflicted wound.

It has left the profession exposed and unprepared for the arrival of the open sharing economy built on trust and maintained by the soft skills of managers and their advisors.

This is Part I of a three part series by Greg

We are said to live in the ‘age of information’, with a vast volume of possibly relevant information available to us for every single decision – from the purchase of an everyday item to the resolution of a complex family dispute.    This has led one commentator to remark  that this large amount of information makes us “like a thirsty person who has been condemned to use a thimble to drink from a fire hydrant.”[1]

Training and experience helps to enable lawyers to  identify information that is current, relevant to the jurisdiction, and authoritative.  However, how do unrepresented parties make sense of legal information?

This was the key research question in a project undertaken by myself and an interdisciplinary group of colleagues.   Funded by the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration,  we examined how unrepresented parties involved in disputes engage with the information that they need to make sense of their legal rights and responsibilities.

The results of that research have been published in a series of forthcoming articles, including most recently in volume 27(4) of the Journal of Judicial Administration:

Jonathan Crowe, Rachael Field, Lisa Toohey, Helen Partridge and Lynn McAllister, “Understanding the Legal Information Experience of Non-lawyers: Lessons from the Family Law Context” 27(4) Journal of Judicial Administration 137.

What is “legal information experience”  and why does it matter?

Research into legal needs is not a new phenomenon – and it typically focusses on the prevalence of particular types of legal problems, the interaction between different types of legal problems, and the consequences of legal problems for the wellbeing (physical, mental and financial) of individuals.  An excellent example of  this type of research is the large-scale legal needs survey work of the Law and Justice Foundation  of NSW.

“Legal information experience” can be categorised as a subset of legal needs research, but it differs from much existing work on legal needs in its focus and methodology. While some legal needs studies may also consider the role of information, such as the sources that individuals have consulted in order to address their needs, this is usually from a perspective of satisfaction with the available options.

Research into the legal information experience, by contrast, focuses on the lived experiences of people accessing legal information, including how they locate sources of information, engage with those sources and use them to understand their situations.   It uses  a qualitative, interpretive research method based on in-depth interviews with a smaller sample of participants.  This approach is used to gain a detailed understanding of a participant’s unique perspective and to reveal the meaning of the experience from their point of view.[2] It therefore represents a useful complement to larger legal needs surveys in unravelling the complexities of how to best facilitate access to justice.  

Our study of legal information experience identified five key issues:

1. Complexity: Parties struggle with the complexity of the information experience;
2. Credibility: Parties have difficulty in assessing the credibility and reliability of sources of information and the information provided;
3. Preferences: Parties indicate clear source preferences, which are not the same preferences that lawyers might expect;
4. Application: Parties have difficulty applying the information retrieved from various sources to their individual situation; and
5. Language: Parties tend to use language that is no longer reflected in family law legislation or practice.

Each of these aspects of  legal information experience has implications for how legal information can be provided, communicated and interacted with by both experts and non-experts alike.  It also offers insights into how to optimise interactions between experts and non-experts.

In subsequent blog posts we will expand on these findings  and the implications for dispute resolution practitioners, lawyers, and others involved in the communication of legal information.

Footnotes

[1]RS Wurman, Information Anxiety 2 (Que, 2001) 15

[2]S Kvale and S Brinkmann, InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing (SAGE, 2^nd ed, 2009).

Image Credit: wuestenigel (https://www.flickr.com/photos/30478819@N08/30155035707/) Flickr via Compfight (http://compfight.com) cc (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)