AI will Change Dispute Resolution. That Is Exactly Why I Believe in Mediation.

This will be thought-provoking...

I have been working in IT for more than 35 years. I started my career before the internet, and since then I have had a front-row seat to some of the biggest changes in the way we work: the arrival of the internet, enterprise software, digital transformation, cloud computing, automation and now artificial intelligence.

Having experienced these transformations from the inside, I am not particularly worried about AI replacing parts of dispute resolution that human do today.

Why?

Because reading many pages of documents, building chronologies, identifying inconsistencies, checking contracts, especially if the mediator is not a lawyer, or assessing possible outcomes are all things AI will increasingly do faster and, in many cases, better than we can. I expect that very soon AI will be able to provide parties with a highly sophisticated assessment of their dispute, including the relevant legal framework, the strengths and weaknesses of their positions and, importantly, the likely outcome if they were to take the dispute to court or arbitration. The human to human part will remain with us.

And this is where I think things become really interesting.

For a long time, one of the reasons why we needed courts and arbitral tribunals was that we needed somebody independent to assess the facts, the evidence and the applicable law and ultimately tell us what the outcome should be. But what happens when technology can increasingly give both parties access to much of the same base information on which that decision would be made? What happens when each side can use AI to test its arguments, understand its risks and obtain a sophisticated assessment of what a court or arbitral tribunal is likely to decide?

Do we really still need them to decide for us?

Or can we use that information as the starting point for a different conversation: if this is what we are likely to get, what is it that we actually want?

This, to me, is where the future of mediation becomes very compelling. Because there is one fundamental difference between mediation and both litigation and arbitration: the control over the outcome remains with the parties, yet a neutral is involved to guide the process.

When you go to court, you hand the decision to a judge. When you go to arbitration, you hand the decision to an arbitrator or arbitral tribunal. There are very good reasons for having both, and there will always be disputes where a binding third-party decision is necessary. But for the enormous number of ordinary commercial disputes where a settlement is possible, I question whether giving up that control will remain the obvious choice once AI can provide the parties with a much clearer understanding of what a third party is likely to decide.

And there is another important distinction. Courts and arbitral tribunals are there to decide the dispute within the legal framework applicable to the case. That is their strength and their legitimacy. But many disputes are rarely only legal disputes. Behind a contractual claim there may be a customer relationship worth millions, a partnership that both sides would actually prefer to preserve, employees who are affected, a reputation that matters, intellectual property that both parties still need, a future market opportunity, or simply a long history between people who may have to work together again.

The law may tell us who is right. It does not necessarily tell us what is best.

A court may decide that one company owes another €5 million. An arbitral tribunal may reach the same conclusion. But neither is there to ask whether the two companies would actually prefer an agreement involving €3 million paid now, continued cooperation for the next five years, a revised supply arrangement and an end to the dispute without destroying the commercial relationship. That is not a weakness of courts or arbitration. It is simply not their role.

Mediation is different because the parties are not asking someone else to determine the solution. They are using a structured process to find a solution themselves, with a neutral person helping them navigate the parts of the dispute that are not solved by analysing the law.

And this is exactly where I see the role of the mediator changing.

I do not think the future mediator will be the person in the room who knows the most facts. AI will probably know more. It will not make sense for a mediator to spend days reading documents simply because that is what mediators have traditionally done. Let AI do that work.

AI will give the mediator and the parties the information they need. Give them the likely legal and commercial scenarios. Show them where the risks are and what may happen if they do nothing. Then bring the human beings into the room.

Because knowing what a court or arbitral tribunal is likely to decide is not the same as deciding what you want to do. That decision still belongs to you.

And that is where the human side of mediation becomes more important, not less. A mediator can listen to what is being said and what is not being said, recognise when a legal argument is really about something else, help people move away from positions without losing face, explore interests that would never appear in a statement of claim, and create a space in which parties can consider solutions that are simply not available to a judge or arbitrator.

The mediator is not there to compete with AI for information. The mediator is there to help people use information to make a decision.

In that sense, I see AI not as the enemy of mediation but as potentially one of its greatest enablers.

There is also an important development in international commercial disputes that makes this future even more interesting. The United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation, commonly known as the Singapore Convention on Mediation, created an international framework for the recognition and enforcement of qualifying international commercial settlement agreements resulting from mediation. It entered into force in 2020. For cross-border business disputes, this addresses one of the historical concerns surrounding mediation: what happens when the parties reach an agreement in one jurisdiction but need to rely on that agreement in another? Subject to the Convention's scope and requirements, there is now an international enforcement framework specifically for mediated settlements.

So we are moving towards a rather interesting situation. AI can increasingly give us the information we need to understand what a court or arbitral tribunal is likely to do; a neutral mediator can help us deal with the human, commercial and relational dimensions that the legal analysis does not capture; and the parties themselves can remain in control of the final outcome.

For me, that changes the strategic question completely.

Instead of asking, “Who is going to win?”, we can ask, “What are we likely to get if somebody else decides this for us, and knowing that, what would we rather create ourselves?”

That is a very different starting point for dispute resolution.

Again, I do not believe courts will disappear, and I do not believe arbitration will disappear. There will always be situations when they are needed. But I do believe that, for many commercial disputes that are capable of settlement, the logic will increasingly shift towards MEDIATION FIRST.

Not because mediation is softer, easier or somehow more pleasant than litigation or arbitration, but because it allows the parties to make use of the information that technology provides without surrendering their ability to decide what happens next.

Perhaps this is the paradox of AI in dispute resolution: the better AI becomes at telling us what a court or arbitral tribunal is likely to decide, the less obvious it becomes that we need them to decide it for us.

And that is why, as someone who has spent 35 years watching technology change the way we work and who now works at the intersection of business, technology and mediation, I believe mediation has a very strong future.

Exactly because of AI.

ps: just look at the image Copilot created based on my article. I am amazed.