The Month in Retrospect: What Else Happened in July

Robert BoyleEvaluation of the Mediation Act

Five years ago, the Mediation Act (Mediationsgesetz) came into force. We did cover the legislative process on the blog in quite some detail. The Act provided for an evaluation to take place at the fifth anniversary. This report has now been published by the Federal Ministry of Justice. Here is a link to the full report, and here is a link to a summary produced by Professor Reinhard Greger, who served as a judge at the Federal Supreme Court before becoming a full-time academic. His summary is critical of the success of the Act: In essence, the total number of mediations remains low, and has not increased significantly since the Act came into force. Only very few mediators can actually earn a meaningful income by providing mediation services. Continue reading

“We’d better take a lawyer for that!” Conflict Management Study by Bucerius and Taylor Wessing

Taylor Wessing and the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession of Bucerius Law School have jointly conducted a study on what in-house lawyers in Germany expect of their external lawyers in conflict management. On Taylor Wessing’s part, my Hamburg partner Axel Bösch had the lead on this project. If you would like to receive a copy of the study, please let Axel or me know. Continue reading