When I told people that I was setting up a mediation business in Torbay, after many years as a solicitor, I think a lot of people thought I was a bit mad. That’s possibly because many of them misread it and thought it was a meditation business, which they suggested might be better situated in Totnes, a town traditionally twinned with Narnia!
However, whereas I am all for taking some time out, to reflect, and meditate I am in fact working in a field now that I think everyone will know about in the next few years. This is because recent changes in the law mean that most court cases now will encounter some kind of mediation before a Judge is allowed to make decisions at a final court hearing.
 As Hanibal in one of my favourite 80’s TV shows The A Team used to say, ‘I love it when a plan comes together’ and it is fortunate that my plan for this business has coincided in these big changes in the law.
Without much fanfare and with hardly any press coverage, in October 2024, fundamental changes were made to Civil Procedure Rules which are the laws that govern almost all court cases, other than criminal and family law matters. What these changes did following a landmark case in November 2023, called Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil Borough Council, was allow Judges to order that those involved in a legal dispute must mediate before a matter goes to a final hearing for a Judge to decide. Even more importantly now if a person or business refuses to mediate or explore some other form of ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) the likelihood is that they may have to pay all of the legal and other costs of the other side if unsuccessful at court. Parties can now apply to court to force the other side to mediate, and I can see cases in the future, where someone might even succeed at court (for example in getting money owed off someone else) but not be given all their lawyers costs, because they would not mediate early on.
 Why is this important? Because I can tell you, having worked in the courts for the past decade and a half, we have a broken legal system. Anyone who read the book The Secret Barrister, will be aware our criminal justice system is on its knees. What is less well-publicised is that all other areas of the law are equally in crisis, with massive delays, court hearings frequently cancelled, and the whole thing costing a vast fortune, with only the lawyers really benefiting.
Take the family law system alone: I read recently that the average child contact case now takes 43 weeks to get to a final hearing, and a decision being made. Last year, the average divorce in England costs each party £35,000. In my experience that time scale and those costs are, certainly often far greater. Therefore, if you, for example, were being denied access to seeing your children you might wait the best part of a year to be able to do so, even though there might be no good reason why you should not. During my time as a solicitor, I had such cases that would often go on for 2-3 years! Quite recently I inherited a divorce case from another firm, where a man had already spent in excess of £200,000.00 in legal fees and the case was not over. He could have bought a house outright with that.
 The main advantage of mediation is you avoid all that. You save time and you save money. More importantly you save the stress of being in dispute with someone. I have lost count, especially since Covid of the legal clients I had who were suicidal or expressed feeling that way. If you are dealing with something like a neighbour dispute, you are living and breathing it every day. If you are a business owner, the dispute and dealing with solicitors, eats into your day, when you could be spending time actually doing work and making money.
 Since setting up Riviera Mediation, we have also dealt with families who are arguing over a parent’s estate and as a solicitor I certainly dealt with some horrendous cases with siblings who, for example, told me they would all have Sunday lunch for the past 30 years, each week, but now they were arguing about money would not be in the same room with each other. Often in such cases a vast amount of the money got eaten up in legal fees like the Charles Dicken’s case of Jarndice v Jarndice in Bleak House.
 What all these scenarios have in common is that long court proceedings tend to make the situation worse not better. Anyone who has been involved in a dispute or court case will tell you, even at a low level it’s impossible not to live and breathe it.
 The reason I am practically evangelical about mediation is that I see it work on a weekly basis. Situations that you think are impossible can be resolved in a day. I did a mediation for Exeter University, last year, between two academics who had not spoken to each other for weeks. By lunchtime they were having lunch together, and by the end of the day we had a long-written agreement with many action points about how they might work and communicate better with each other going forward.
 I believe that any problem can be solved through mediation – it doesn’t just have to be legal. So, back to The A Team, and to slightly paraphrase ‘If you have a problem. If no-one else can help, and if you can find us, maybe you can hire Riviera Mediation.’
 Ben Tisdall is a former solicitor and now runs Riviera Mediation www.rivieramediation.co.uk Email ben@rivieramediation.co.uk
 May 2025