New lawyers will have an advantage in mediation over their more experienced colleagues if plans proposed by Sir Rupert Jackson and backed by Lord Neuberger come to fruition. They will receive formal training about mediation as an integral part of their legal education. In a speech delivered to the Civil Mediation Council on 10th May 2010, Lord Neuberger, Master of the Rolls, repeated the call made by Sir Rupert Jackson in his final report on costs for a serious campaign to educate lawyers and judges about the benefits which ADR can bring.This training needs to start at the very beginning, with new law students.
… if we are to make mediation second nature, if it is to be litigation’s twin, then we need to embed that culture from the very beginning of a lawyer’s training. Cultures change in a number of ways. They change through training those who are already part of the culture – something which we all have experience of having had to reorient our approach to litigation following the culture change introduced by the Woolf reforms … Importantly though, cultures change through teaching those who have not yet entered it. They change by teaching the new culture rather than the old one.
He said that mediation needs to “take take its proper place on the curriculum just as it is taking its proper place within our justice system.” This means there has to be a change of attitude in university law departments and law schools around the country.
It will be needed to ensure that our young lawyers from the outset of their legal careers, from the start of their first lectures and their first practical vocational courses gain a proper understanding that a knowledge and appreciation of mediation and ADR is as necessary a part of what it means to be a good lawyer as a knowledge of our adversarial system and substantive law.
To avoid proselytising I echo Lord Neuberger’s warning about being carried away by zeal. The purpose of this education is not raise mediation above all other forms of dispute resolution but rather to teach lawyers the when, why and how of using it.
If you would like further information about mediation training for lawyers please do not hesitate to contact me.
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