Channelling Civil Disputes to Mediation: Lessons from the English Legal System, 29 January 2020

Md Mahar Abbasy will be presenting on aspects of his PhD

Nowadays Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), in particular mediation is increasingly successful in settling disputes outside court without going through a lengthy and costly court procedure. In practice, despite the potential benefits mediation offers, it remains under-used in England and Wales. This is a significant issue as litigation becomes increasingly expensive, and funding options are limited. This thesis seeks to identify the reasons behind this, and what can be done to encourage more parties to engage in mediation rather than going to court, and this will be the main focus of my research.

It is noted that to encourage more parties to consider mediation, some judges, academics and ADR providers are in support of making mediation mandatory. There are two opposing and distinctly divergent judicial and academic schools of thought on the issue of using compulsion to mediate and the debate continues. It is noted that while the UK government is strongly in favour of promotion of mediation, it has no appetite to make it mandatory. Policymakers have taken some measures, notably mandatory requirement for separating couples to attend an initial Mediation Information Assessment Meeting (MIAM), mandatory notification to ACAS (Early Conciliation) for employment disputes, Small Business Commissioner, mandatory sectoral consumer ADR schemes for traders and the new revolutionary online court to promote mediation in England and Wales, but there is no in-depth comparative analysis of these measures to show how far these initiatives have been successful to increase the uptake of mediation. Therefore, this study carries out a comparative analysis of these measures to identify best practices and what can be done to improve the current practice which has not been done before. In doing so, this thesis investigates the best way forward to make effective use of mediation in England and Wales. This study refers to the practice of mediation in Bangladesh as a case study, but it mainly focuses on the development of mediation in the UK.

Details

Date and time: Wednesday, 29 January 2020, 1—2pm
Location: Room 164 Jan Grodecki Room, Fielding Johnson Building, University of Leicester Law School
Event open to: Staff and students
Further information: masood.ahmed@le.ac.uk