Charlie Irvine is a freelance mediator and teacher based in Glasgow, Scotland. And he is visiting Professor at Strathclyde Law School, leading Masters programme in Mediation and Conflict Resolution.

On July 12, 2014 Irvine posted an article which reads:

===
Many of us have been hearing about Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) for years but haven’t quite got round to using it. It sounds like a nice idea when face-to-face mediation isn’t an option through distance and/or cost. And yet I suspect that for most mediators the ‘gold standard’ is being in the same room as our clients. We can see people, hear them, feel the emotional temperature; we can also speak, use our eyes, use our hands; even jump to our feet when things get stuck. A small screen, by contrast, seems flat, miniature and limited.

However, if precedent is anything to go by, it would be foolish to bet against the forward march of technology. The first PCs were large, expensive and had tiny memories; early mobile phones look like props in a cult comedy. Moore’s law (see Moore’s Law) more or less predicts that computer processing power will double every two years. Thus innovations that start out a little clunky often function beautifully once the technology is fast/small/inexpensive enough. This is one of the reasons for Richard Susskind’s inclusion of Online Dispute Resolution in his top ten “disruptive technologies” that will transform legal business (Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

I recently had the chance to demo a new online dispute resolution system (www.odro.co.uk ). Following a nice line of tradition developed by Giuseppe Leone’s Virtual Mediation Lab (www.virtualmediationlab.com) I conducted a one-hour workplace mediation simulation. The parties were played by colleagues in Aberdeen and Yorkshire; the commentator was in London; I live in Glasgow (four parts of the UK separated by nearly 1000km). The dispute centred on a dysfunctional university research project.
===

To read the rest of Irvine's article and to watch his full mediation demo click here - http://goo.gl/3EOANb

Please Note. Since 2013, we no longer use Skype for Virtual Mediation Lab online mediation simulations and training. Instead, we prefer to use a new video conferencing software called Zoom.us. To learn why click here http://goo.gl/D1SWhr

Giuseppe Leone