Attorney: Mediation Act could save court time

LONG drawn out civil court proceedings may soon be a thing of the past with the implementation of the Mediation Act of 2004. According to attorney Stephanie Daly, the mediation process is a window of opportunity for parties to resolve disputes without having the matter fall into the court system. Daly was speaking at the Dispute Resolution Centre’s breakfast meeting on the Mediation Act, 2004, at the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce yesterday. The attorney is a member of the recently appointed Mediation Board of Trinidad and Tobago, which is responsible for the creation of standards for the accreditation of mediation training programmes.

Daly said the mediation process would involve the assistance of certified mediators, whose roles would be to help disputing parties find possible out-of-court solutions. What disputing parties needed to do, Daly said, was ask themselves if taking all disputes to court was good business sense, since litigation was an extremely time-consuming and costly procedure. Some important issues faced by the board, she said, were putting proper legal protections in place, protecting confidentiality, limiting admissibility in evidence, immunity for mediators and the development of an ethical mediation profession.

While the board was in the process of reviewing applications of potential mediators, Daly said, obtaining an adequate supply of mediators was one of the challenges it faced. She said applicants are expected to satisfy the training requirements of the board and such training must be done at agencies which had been accredited by the board and had met the standards of the Act. These agencies were not necessarily expected to be commercial, she said, adding that NGOs were listed in the group that could apply for agency status.