Mediation Committee

The Mediation Committee has become a valuable resource for New York practitioners and consumers of mediation. The Committee promotes the use of mediation, to present programs on topics of interest to mediators and advocates, to provide a forum to debate policy issues important to the profession, and to take positions on such issues when it is appropriate to do so.

The Mediation Committee has been very active over this past year and has several exciting projects in the pipeline for 2013-2014. Prior Committee programs and reports include, a position paper on the Adoption of Court-Annexed Mediation,the Committee?s report on mediator quality ? the result of a year-long study of past and current thinking on the topic which was enthusiastically adopted by the Section. The committee also undertook an ambitious survey of New York litigators to learn their views on mediation; the results have been tabulated are available for review.

Another project is a mentor-mentee matchmaking service, which works to give fledgling mediators opportunities to learn from their more experienced colleagues.

In addition to these ventures, we’ve invited leading practitioners in the field to our bi-monthly meetings to facilitate discussions of best practices and practice development, including fee issues, mediators? proposals,settlement agreements, moving past impasse and risk analysis. This is a continuing feature at our committee meetings.

As mediation is a dispute resolution tool that is of great benefit in many substantive areas of the law, a series of papers on the benefits of mediation in many fields of law were being prepared to educate practitioners about how mediation might benefit their clients and how it might be of particular applicability in specific fields of law.