Let me say to begin with, that much as I'm grateful for the chance to sit on this panel, that  DisputesLoop is not, in the conventional sense, a provider. 

DisputesLoop is a publisher of market information, and a mechanism for users to collaborate in coming to a view about the skills and aptitudes of mediators, arbitrators and so forth. 

Nevertheless it could be said that by making appointment-critical data more widely available I'm encouraging users to go direct: I don't think I am. I've got no evidence for this, but my suspicion is that there's no substitute for consulting a knowledgeable, human third-party when making an appointment.

The question then becomes which third party? In the UK, users have made it pretty clear that they won't pay much of a premium for this kind of advice. My initial conclusion from that was that users, by and large, attach little importance to finding the right mediator. 

I think that analysis was, perhaps, too simplistic. I now think that resistance to paying a premium has risen in line with growing awareness of some service providers' internal conflicts and difficulties. When finding a mediator, we have to recognise that the interests of the service provider are of course broader than merely finding "the right" or the "best mediator" for any particular dispute. 

First, providers have an obligation to those on their panels to find them some work. Things get very awkward when the mediator who has paid the organisation £5,000 to become accredited then gets no work. Over-training in the UK has saturated the market to such a degree that, by my estimates, only three in every one hundred mediators accredited will ever get work as a mediator. 

I have no sympathy for the providers in this respect: it is a problem of their own making. 

Another issue of what mark-up providers make on particular mediators. Not all providers are as scrupulous as those on this panel; some will take whatever percentage they can get, and they'll disguise this fact from the clients, and hide their invoices from the mediators. If they can scoop 80% of a novice mediator's fee, they'll do so: it's bad for the client, but good for the bottom line. 

If the justification is ensuring succession, then I'm sympathetic to the ideal, but let's be honest, as a practice this stinks and has to change. 

What we're witnessing here are the effects of "information asymmetry" - A supplier knows more than the buyer and therefore has a financial incentive to punt out inferior goods whenever they can get away with it.

Provider organisations with a combination of employed mediators and external panelists, get themselves in a horrid mess when purporting to find the "right" mediator for a client. They might email a decent shortlist of possible candidates, but you'd be amazed how often the "best" mediator, the "right" mediator, is the one in the next door office.

Now, you can't fool all of the people all of the time. To protect themselves against being ripped off, users keep a tight lid on what they'll pay. Tight-fistedness, for want of a better word, is a characteristic of mediation that is nowhere in evidence in other - less successful - types of dispute resolution. 

It seems obvious to me that what this market needs, and what it evidently lacks, is informed consumers. Users will continue to discriminate on price until they are offered a convincing  means to discriminate on quality. 

With a few suitable checks and balances, DisputesLoop is a free-marketeers solution to some of the above. With such a system in operation, there's no need to regulate, to stifle what is, and should remain, a flexible, intuitive, and emphatically unmeasurable discipline. 

The word of a trusted colleague will trump any amount of accreditations gained and assessments passed, and that is what DisputesLoop aims to replicate. Then it's down to the users. Through the site, you can specify what you want from a mediator, put the work out to tender and critique the results. If you're not getting what you asked for, say so, then change your criteria.

The technology now exists to reinvent the appointment process, and DisputesLoop, I believe, is the most efficient and most effective way to guarantee quality from the market, be they specialists or generalists; new market entrants or ageing warriors.

Now where's my coat?

Matthew Rushton

London

October 2009