Introduction

As formal arbitration is mirroring litigation in both time and expense, commercial mediation is becoming an attractive ADR option, and as such it can be useful to keep abreast of alternative approaches and methods to better serve parties in a dispute. I recently had an opportunity to try a new approach when I was asked to mediate a dispute between two brothers in Japan. While they both resided in Japan, the immediate context of their dispute was the ownership of real estate in the U.S. The family's fortune, based originally on real estate holdings in Japan, had ...