Two roles are available here and they are structurally different: mediator — neutral, appointed jointly, advising nobody and deciding nothing — or your solicitor going into someone else’s mediation. One rule governs both, absolutely: never both in the same dispute.
The Sequence: Conflicts, Invitation, Agreement, Fees
The conflicts check comes first — before any substantive conversation about the dispute. We ask for the names of every party (individuals, companies, management companies, agents, guarantors) and check them against the firm’s records: the firm does not mediate any dispute in which it acts or has acted for a party, and does not act for a party in a dispute it is mediating. If a conflict exists you are told immediately, before disclosing anything sensitive. That sequencing exists because a mediator’s only real asset is neutrality, and it must be verifiable at the start rather than argued about later. Then the invitation: one party almost always proposes mediation, which is entirely normal despite the stubborn belief that suggesting it signals a weak case — and section 14 obliges solicitors to raise it anyway, which makes the approach easy to frame. The other side takes their own advice; if they agree, the agreement to mediate is circulated and signed by everyone: how the process runs and ends, neutrality and the mediator’s obligations, confidentiality and its limits, the right to legal advice (especially before signing anything), who attends and with what authority, what happens to papers afterwards. Fees are agreed in writing with all parties before commencement — commonly shared equally, though parties may agree otherwise — so nobody discovers a fee position mid-process. No figures appear on this site because the shape of a mediation determines them: parties, preparation, single day or staged process, venue.
Venues, Online Mediation — and the Clause That Prevents the Next One
Mediations run at The Ormond Building on Ormond Quay (city-centre neutral ground with enough rooms for private sessions to work properly, which matters in multi-party OMC days), at the firm’s Kilkenny office at 2 Rose Inn Street, at neutral venues, at the parties’ own premises — or fully online, which is a designed feature rather than a fallback: it removes travel, lets dispersed parties attend properly (the OMC director working abroad, the shareholder who has already left the country, the sibling in another jurisdiction), and translates the private-session structure cleanly into breakout rooms. Multi-party matters get process design before anything else: who attends, in what combination, with what authority to bind. And upstream of every dispute sits the cheapest work available: the mediation clause — drafted into contracts, leases, shareholders’ agreements, partnership deeds, joint ventures, and OMC constitutions and house rules. It commits the parties to attempt mediation before litigating and sets the machinery: appointment if the parties cannot agree, timeframes, costs, and how the clause interacts with urgent relief (a well-drafted clause never blocks a genuinely urgent injunction). Its value is behavioural: the hardest moment in any dispute is agreeing to talk when everyone is angry and each side fears proposing it looks weak — a clause makes that decision in advance, calmly, while everyone is still getting along.
Ready to Appoint - or Just Exploring?
Send the names of every party first for the conflicts check, then the dispute in ten lines. An approach from one party is confidential and commits nobody to anything.
Call 01 5827148