ABSTRACT
There are two major schools of thought among mediation practitioners as to how to approach parties who are locked in a dispute and need assistance. One school of thought involves helping to facilitate the parties to make their own decisions and come to their own conclusions. This is very much akin to the role of a psychiatrist who listens and points out errors in thought to the patient so that the patient can eventually come to the correct decision. Another school of thought involves telling the parties where they stand and in effect giving an evaluation of what will probably happen. The birth of evaluative mediation can be traced to the United States. Later in the United Kingdom there was a high expectation that the emphasis placed on alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in the civil justice reforms and the subsequent Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) would cause a change in the adversarial litigation culture and increase mediation use.
