Resolving a Dispute
If you have a differing point of view from, or disagree over strategy with another person in your place of work or at home it can sometimes seem like the dispute is destined to go round and round endlessly.
It is in these kinds of situations where you need a mediator to help provide a resolution to the dispute.
What is Dispute Resolution?
To put it simply, dispute resolution is the method that is used to resolve disagreement between two or more different parties.
There are a number of established ways to go about resolving a dispute between two parties:
- Litigation – otherwise refered to as lawsuits. This is a situation in which one party that claims to have suffered damages as a result of another party’s actions brings them before a judge and demands a legal or equitable remedy that will act to end the dispute.
- Arbitration – an out of court settlement technique whereby a third party reviews the case and provides a decision that is considered legally binding.
- Collaborative Law – a settlement process for separating couples that want to avoid litigation
- Mediation – a settlement process whereby a third party helps the disagreeing parties to negotiate their own resolution
- Conciliation – a settlement mechanism whereby a third party acts as a relay between the two parties, meeting each of them separately to attempt to resolve their differences. The two parties can communicate directly without meeting, over the phone or via mail, for example.
- Negotiation – there are various forms but negotiations are essentially a sustained dialogue between two parties with the intention of reaching an agreement or resolving a difference.
Dispute resolution thus falls into two chief kinds:
- Adjudicative Processes – this includes all processes where an arbitrator, jury or judge is responsible for the final decision such as arbitration or litigation
- Consensual Processes – this encompasses the processes that involve the disputing parties attempt to reach an agreement themselves such as mediation or negotiation
It is an unfortunate truth of human relations and interactions throughout history that some disputes, no matter how skilled the intervention may be, cannot be resolved. These kind of disputes are entitled intractable disputes.