Mercedes Tarrazon, a veteran arbitrator and mediator in Barcelona, provides a platform for making parties and their attorneys more comfortable with mediation, arbitration, and other hybrid processes that keep people and companies out of litigation. Host Mike McIlwrath interviews Tarrazon about her effective technique for helping parties obtain satisfactory outcomes from their arbitrations--even well before the award stage. Tarrazon explains a practice that she has adapted in a variety of commercial conflict resolution settings around the world.

More ADR evolution this week, from a law firm perspective. Partner Alexander J. Oddy, of the London-based law firm Herbert Smith, talks with Mike about Inside Track, a comprehensive commercial conflict resolution report that was at the heart of the "honorable mention" the firm received in last year's CPR Law Firm Award for Excellence in ADR. The study found four categories of ADR "participants:" nonusers, negotiators, "ad hocs" and "embedded." Alexander and Mike discuss where business and their representatives go right, and go wrong, with their approaches to mediation and other processes.

This week, common ADR ground is struck between competitors. Host Michael McIlwrath sits down with a counterpart at Siemens in Germany, Senior Counsel Volker Mahnken. While the two won't agree on whose products and services are better, they unite over their dissatisfaction with current arbitration practices. And they happily agree on their in-house customer's satisfaction with mediation. Mahnken discusses a recent article he coauthored calling for an overhaul of international construction arbitration processes.

Document production isn't just a matter of complying with certain procedural rules. As Frederick T. Davis, a Paris-based partner of Debevoise & Plimpton, makes clear in this week's episode, legal and cultural differences across jurisdictions can raise a number of complexities that can only be dealt with through open and honest negotiations that are best done at the outset of a case or government investigation.

This week, Mike goes on a short Euro mediation tour. Find out how three top practitioners from three different countries-Belgium, Romania, and Spain --see their current commercial and court mediation scenes. Mike speaks with Helena De Backer, name partner in Brussels' De Backer & Bastin, and founder and current president of the Brussels Business Mediation Center; Constantin-Adi Gavrila is director of the Craiova Mediation Center, and president of the Mediation Centers Union in Romania; and Mercedes Tarrazon is an independent mediator and arbitrator in Barcelona.

Bringing missing advocacy skills into practice was an important part of the late Thomas Walde's view of teaching alternative dispute resolution. IDN host Mike McIlwrath sat down with the University of Dundee (Dundee, Scotland) professor and seminal theorist about his works and his views on presenting an arbitration case shortly before Walde died in an accident on Oct. 11. Mike assesses the legacy via the professor's own words, and sums up with his own reflection of Walde's work.

Is it true that 86% of corporate users are satisfied with arbitration? Really? Or do they mean that they "prefer arbitration," rather than they are satisfied? Host Michael McIlwrath casts a skeptical eye on arbitration use surveys released by PriceWaterhouseCoopers over the past two years. Prof. Loukas Mistelis, of the Queen Mary School of Law, University of London's School of International Arbitration, discusses the results on attitudes toward arbitration success and enforceability issues, and defends the studies.

It's time for Future History: sociologist Robert L. Carneiro, of the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University, both in New York, returns to IDN this week to expand on his views of the future of dispute resolution. In examining nation states as a source of conflicts, Carneiro, AMNH's Curator of South American Ethnology, looks back on 3,500 years and sees "an irresistible trend for the number of political units" to decrease, and for their size to increase. Carneiro tells host Michael McIlwrath how long it will take for the world’s 193 autonomous political units--down from half a million such units in 1500 B.C.—to merge into one, nearly conflict-free world government, and how increasing jobs' specialization fits into the picture.

You're going to get your cross cultural communications wrong. But, according to veteran Australian mediator Joanna Kalowski, the way you get it right after you get it wrong will make the difference in whether those communications and negotiations are successful. This week, Mike McIlwrath has a discussion with Kalowski reflecting her intense mediation experiences across borders and with indigenous people, both in government and in private practice.

This week, IDN host Mike McIlwrath takes on...his boss? Listen in on his discussion with Kenneth S. Resnick, vice president and general counsel of GE Oil & Gas in Florence, Italy. Ken and Mike cover the company's litigation and resolution challenges from the perspective of being a transnational corporation-a company, Mike says, that is global, but also operates as a localized entity in many places. The conversation runs from the large questions of managing risk in accordance with local dispute resolution practices and standards, to case management issues such as staffing and expertise. They also discuss in depth how the company deals with contract issues.