Do Lawyers Sabotage the Mediation Process?

In the Philippines the courts are wrestling with an interesting question. They refer a wide variety of cases to mediation and have a 71% success rate. But now the question arises -- should lawyers be banned from the mediation conference?



Philippine News -- Manila Standard Today -- To have or not to have -- dec4_2006

The presence of lawyers together with their clients became the subject of animated, if not contentious, debate in the workshop of appellate court mediators because the proposal of Prof. Alfredo Tadiar, the chairman of the Appellate Court Mediation was that lawyers should be barred from the initial mediation conference in the appellate court. Professor Tadiar was coming from the position that in the trial courts, the lawyers have often been the cause of failure in mediation.

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