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Editorial By the time you get this edition the New Year will have long gone, but the SE Branch Committee and I would like to wish all its members a Happy and Prosperous New Year. There are several reasons why you are getting the January edition in February, but it comes down to e decision to wait until we had the right content rather than publish with less content. In this edition, apart from the usual features and meeting write-ups, we have some interesting articles. Francis Miller makes a point about arbitrators not bringing their own rule books to the proceedings and compares this with the published and readily accessible rules for court proceedings. It will be interesting to hear what the members think because it seems to me that this does not take account of the difference in approaches that individual judges adopt, within the rules of procedure within which they operate. In another article Francis makes the point that difficulty in understanding the law can mean that parties either do not understand their positions, or worse still are put off pursuing a valid claim. I think this may the case for small claims, but for larger ones this is surely why the legal profession exists. Kevin Trash has provided a couple of articles about mediation. There is no doubt that this process has an increasingly important part to play in resolving disputes, unlike judges though that may be involved in a wide variety of disputes, Kevin is suggesting that mediators should have experience of the dispute, although not if the parties agree that is not a requirement. Given that mediation proceedings are often over a much shorter time than those in court and the inevitably increased bias towards technical and businesses considerations rather than legal ones, I think this must be right, although as Kevin suggests, ultimately the market will decide. In his article about the Water Framework Directive, Ian Patterson Wilson concludes that mediation-style guidance is to be used to lessen the possibly heavy hand of the enforcement agencies and no doubt to help land owners understand the rules that Francis is concerned about. With all this talk of dispute resolution, you may be interested to know that your editor has taken over the reins from Peter Chapman and is now the UK representative for the Dispute Resolution Board Foundation. Peter gave the branch a talk about the Dispute Board process last June and a summary of that talk was published in Issue 64. The unique feature of DRBs over that of any other form of dispute resolution (including mediation) is that there is the ability to avoid disputes in the first place. To enable this to happen there is no doubt in my mind that the board must have technical expertise in the subject matter and also the legal expertise to guide the parties through the complex rules they may not properly understand. Murray Armes |
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