hello everyone and welcome to the second of our video tutorials on civil process adr or alternative dispute resolution in our first video on adr we looked at the different methods or types of adr in this video tutorial we'll be looking solely at the advantages and disadvantages of each method and it's going to be a bit of a whistle stop tour and so you need to supplement this video with your own notes but i will go over the key advantages and disadvantages of each with you so if we start then with our first method which is negotiation if you recall negotiation is the simplest form of adr because this involves the parties um trying to resolve their dispute directly together now key advantages of that are that it is completely private so if it's just the two of you negotiating you don't have to worry about being embarrassed about things you've said or emails you know it's all kept between the parties so that can be advantageous it might be that you get a quick resolution um so it might be a lot faster than court because you can negotiate immediately and get a resolution potentially immediately as i mentioned last time negotiation's really good because you can perhaps maintain relationships remember if you sue someone in court it's very unlikely that they're going to want to have a relationship with you in the future so if you're a business wanting to continue to use a particular supplier for instance negotiations going to be preferable and going to court because um they're more likely to want to trade with you in the future and you're going to be closing that door if you see them in court another advantage is that it's relatively informal um on a very basic level you could arrange to meet someone just in a cafe you could negotiate by text if you wanted to so it can be quite informal and easy for the parties to do obviously if you get solicitors involved then it becomes less informal but there are key advantages disadvantages then and as i've just mentioned sometimes parties will employ solicitors to act on their behalf to negotiate on their behalf and as soon as you start doing that that can make the process very costly um we did talk last time about the fact that if solicitors are used and there's negotiation in that way lots of cases will be settled out of court but what i've put here is another disadvantage is that sometimes these offers offers to settle are not actually agreed until the day of court so that's wasting time um it's wasting money um so we would want the settlement to be uh agreed quicker than that ideally um another disadvantage is that people sometimes see it as a halfway house um and sometimes i think people are worried that if they negotiate they might not get as much as if they went to court um and if a party is particularly angry if the claimant's angry with the defendant um you know their natural human response might be that they want to make them suffer in a way by going to court so they might not feel that negotiating is really getting them the closure or that they're looking for so some advantages and disadvantages there of negotiation let's have a look at the next one then so our second type or method of azr was mediation and if you remember mediation is a step up i suppose from negotiation and it's where the parties um get a neutral third party to go as a go-between often between the two parties to help them resolve their dispute and we said last time that mediation is particularly popular in family disputes and you can imagine that if emotions are running high between um two individuals they might not want to speak to each other directly there might be a lot of animosity or bad feeling between them so sometimes having a neutral third party can help them to talk to open up those doors of communication in terms of advantages and it's private i mean you have got your third party involved but apart from that it's a private and a confidential process and a good thing about it is that it's voluntary parties are entering into it voluntarily and that's an advantage because if you're not forced into something hopefully you're more likely to want to make it work it's more likely to be successful it's quick cost effective accessible remember a very basic level this could be as simple as you getting um a mutual friend to help you and your friend who aren't talking come to an agreement and a bit like with negotiation there's a good chance that you can maintain a relationship afterwards because again it's better to try and mediate with the other person rather than suing them um in court and it's based on compromise so each side hopefully will get something that they want and it's not based on a strict application of the law um and we've got a statistic here that um over 80 of cases are settled at mediation so that suggests it is a very effective method as always though we've got disadvantages and i've got some of the key ones listed down the side here a big disadvantage is that with mediation we say that the neutral third party or the mediator their role is only facilitative which means that they're not really very active they don't generally suggest ways of solving the dispute most of the time they are just acting as a go-between passing messages on um so they're not really reaching helping to reach a solution per se another disadvantage is that parties have to want to reach a compromise so you can imagine in family disputes if one party is very angry with the other party they might not be willing to reach a compromise so mediation's only going to be effective if the parties are willing to do a bit of give and take mediation isn't normally legally binding so it might mean that even if you try this it might fail and you end up in court anyway another disadvantage is that often if people settle using mediation the amounts agreed are often lower than with other settlements and it could be potentially that a weaker party is forced into a settlement so if one of the parties um is a lot more confident maybe aggressive with what they want um and the other party is a little bit meeker they might come out of it not in an ideal position potentially um although we've said a big advantage is that it's voluntary we have seen with the introduction of miami's for instance with divorces that it's increasingly being seen as a compulsory step and if you force anyone to do anything um often they won't necessarily do it to the best of their ability they they might resent the fact they're being forced into it and i've put there that they might have a half-hearted commitment so if they're forced into it it's less likely to be successful have a look then at our next method or type of adr conciliation and look at the advantages and disadvantages here so conciliation remember is very similar to mediation because again you've got a third party helping the parties to reach a solution but this time a conciliator plays a much more active role and will offer solutions and to the parties in terms of advantages it is cheaper than going to court again like with mediation um it's private and confidential yes okay you've got the conciliator but they will keep the dispute um confidential and an advantage here over mediation is that as i've said the conciliator plays a more active role and they will suggest areas of compromise and they might come up with ideas or solutions that the parties themselves haven't thought of so with negotiation if it's just the two parties they might be limited to what they can think of to resolve it but a conciliator can be a fresh pair of eyes that's going to come up with new ideas ways forward um accas which is the body that is used in a lot of industrial disputes adopts a prevention rather than cure approach so akas actually provides a lot of advice to employers on how they can actually avoid disputes from arising in the first place and that's got to be a good thing so giving suggestions for policies and things like that that's going to avoid maybe accusations of discrimination and things like that so avoidance is always going to be better than ending up in a dispute so you can say that this is quite a forward-looking method and it can avoid further action akas very useful for employment disputes employers often quite keen to use them because they'd rather solve it through conciliation than going to court and it can be very useful in identifying and clarifying the main issues in the dispute so sometimes in a dispute when parties um are feeling quite het up and passionate um they might not be seeing the bigger picture conciliation be quite can be quite good in identifying they're upset about x y and zed because so that's quite useful in terms of disadvantages it's going to heavily rely on the skills of the conciliator so if you've got a conciliator that's very experienced they're obviously going to be able to come up with perhaps more solutions and be more useful to the parties than a less experienced one and again like with mediation your parties have to want to reach a compromise and again it's not normally legally binding which could mean that if you go through all of this process with accass it might still fail and you could end up in court anyway okay so let's move on to our very last type or method of adr and look at the advantages and disadvantages here so arbitration then remember is the most formal of the adr methods and it is where the parties agree to submit their dispute to a party to make a formal decision on it so um it will be very much like a court judgment but without going to court um and the fact that it's a formally binding decision has a big advantage in that it can be enforced by the courts so this agreement does have to be stuck to which is an advantage compared to the other methods and the parties have discretion as to the choice of arbitrator so they've got some freedom there to do that and they also have quite a lot of discretion about how the procedure is going to be followed so um they can choose the venue the date the number of witnesses so you've got a lot more um power than you have if you're going through the the court system there's really any publicity so although it is binding like a court decision you're not gonna have negative press as you might if it actually went to court and scott and avery clauses are there as an advantage because um i suppose it's fair parties know from the outset what they're agreeing to that they're agreeing to arbitration everyone knows where they stand ahead of the time and arbitrators will be experts in their particular field so it will be hopefully good advice and good decisions that are being made disadvantages are that parties may not be on an equal footing in terms of representation at an arbitration hearing so an employer is likely to have more money and potentially more representation you can't get legal aid or help with funding for arbitration and you can although limited for some civil cases so that's something to bear in mind and there might be unexpected legal points arising that perhaps and you would have preferred to have gone to court fees can still be expensive here because this is a formal hearing and there are limited appeals available um and although it is a formally binding process parties often say that they feel that they didn't get their quote day in court so they don't feel as satisfied they don't have the closure they think they would have had had they gone through the civil courts okay so that's just a very brief outline of the key advantages and disadvantages of each of the methods of adr