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Eamon Harrington, dispute resolution partner at Comyn Kelleher Tobin, looks at how Covid-19 and Lockdown 3.0 is having an impact on the court system and on mediations to resolve disputes.
The President of the High Court earlier highlighted the obligation of all stakeholders to ensure that the administration of justice is not brought to a standstill because of Covid-19.
Read moreIt was during late March 2020, soon after the pandemic first made global headlines, that a group of leading mediators and mediation trainers realized on a Zoom call that the ONLY mediation then taking place in the U.S. and around the world was suddenly "online mediation." Further, we also realized that ALL mediation training was also then remarkably taking place online. Further, despite this near complete shift of mediation services and training to the online environment, we also realized that there were barely any standards, guidance or established best practices for online mediation and online mediation training. We decided that we owed it to ourselves and to the global mediation community to explore whether this void can be effectively addressed.
Read moreThe lockdown has represented something of mixed blessing to proponents of mediation.
The lockdown has represented something of mixed blessing to proponents of mediation. On the one hand, stasis in the court system has presented an opportunity for all remote forms of ADR. On the other hand, the prospect of getting to grips with the technology was a pretty daunting one for those of us who struggled even to turn on a microphone at the beginning of last year! Ten months down the line, as we find ourselves back in lockdown, this seems a good point at which to reflect on the experience of conducting remote family mediations.
Read moreThe coronavirus has demonstrated the shocking fragility of the justice system in a way I expect none of us would have foreseen at the close of 2019. Who would’ve thought that we’d wake up one day to find that months of hearings, conferences and trials, some of which had been scheduled years ago, had been administratively adjourned sine die? Or that there would be applications of critical personal and financial importance to our clients that the courts would refuse to hear because their subject matter was not among those listed in a sweeping procedural order issued sua sponte?
Read moreOn January 1, 2020, “zoom” was a verb, a noise a car makes. Three months later, Zoom be came a noun. It happened in the blink of an eye, like when Amazon no longer referred to a river in the rainforest, and Apple was no longer a fruit. Just as suddenly, Corona isn’t a beer served with lime. No one can honestly say the legal profession was prepared for a pandemic. While some companies had a long history of team meetings via WebEx and GoToMeeting, lawyers and the judiciary were far away from regularly using these tools. Yes, we could do arraignments via video from the jail. We could do video depositions. But no one voluntarily selected those options very of ten, especially when in-person transactions seemed more convenient. Now a virtual plat form is our default. Anything in person is the second choice for most. Quite the pivot, born of necessity.
Read moreIt is eight months since I first blogged about the impact that COVID-19 was having on dispute resolution in England in a piece aptly called, Adjudicating in the shadow of coronavirus. (I don’t know why, but that title always makes me think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, Love in the time of cholera. I’ve no idea why, other than the lyrical way the title sounds. Certainly, the stories are worlds apart… but I digress…)
That blog was written at the start of the first national lockdown and I followed it a few weeks later with a piece about the lessons I’d learnt in those first few weeks. By the time Jonathan came to write his October post, A few lessons I have learned from resolving disputes during the pandemic, I’d say we had become “old hands” at this on-line stuff.
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