Expert insights on the art of negotiation, mediation, and preventing disputes before they reach the courtroom.
Commercial disputes rarely begin in arbitration or court; they usually develop gradually through identifiable stages of tension and escalation. Understanding the lifecycle of conflict allows organisations to intervene earlier, control risk, and manage disputes more strategically.
Standard advice tells every in-house team to try mediation before anything else. That advice holds often enough to become reflexive, and reflexive advice is exactly where good judgment stops. Certain disputes are structurally unsuited to mediation, whatever a step clause requires, or whatever the applicable procedural rule requires. Recognizing which ones early saves the one advantage mediation actually offers: timing.
Most executives approach renegotiating an existing contract with caution, softening the request and ready to retreat at the first sign of pushback. That instinct gets the risk backwards. What the other side is actually reading is not the request itself, but whether the business making it still looks reliable under pressure. Preparation is what answers that question.
Most negotiation training builds competence: vocabulary, frameworks, a temporary lift in confidence. Far fewer programs change how a participant relates to the negotiation itself, especially when conflict is involved. That shift, not better case studies or longer follow-up, is the real test of whether training actually worked.
When a counterparty stops responding in a negotiation, most people interpret it as bad news. It rarely is that simple. Silence in a business negotiation carries information, but the information depends entirely on what kind of silence it is. Reading it correctly, rather than reacting to it, is what separates a stalled negotiation from one that simply slowed down.
Most managers and business owners who avoid a difficult conversation believe they are protecting the relationship. The evidence points in the other direction. Postponed conversations do not preserve the status quo. They accumulate dysfunction along a predictable curve, and by the time the conversation finally happens, the options available have narrowed considerably.
When in-house counsel select a mediator for a commercial dispute, the default approach is to check credentials, confirm neutrality, and move on. This misses the question that determines outcome: does this mediator have the commercial experience and substantive depth to do more than manage dialogue, and can they manage decision-makers who are not in the room?