Mediation in Business: SMILE’s Sri Lanka story

This case study from Sri Lanka highlights our learnings and indications of how our training can be applied anywhere in the world of business.

After the sudden deterioration of the Sri Lankan economy in 2021, companies in all sectors were suddenly confronted with innumerable commercial conflicts. Local courts were simply unable to hear the high volume of cases. In cases when a Judgment was passed, many companies were not able to meet their obligations. Their collapse aggravated the economic malaise of the nation.

With the support of international aid organisations, Sage Mediation was assigned the urgent task of designing and implementing an Efficient and Effective Justice (EEJ) initiative that was premised on the use of professional mediation. The aim was to quickly introduce mediation to lawyers and corporate leaders, upskill local mediation centre administrators, and empower local mediators to manage cross-border disputes.

The aid organisations hoped that the EEJ initiative would amicably resolve most commercial conflicts involving Sri Lankan companies, help parties find practical solutions, and become one of the catalysts for Sri Lanka’s economic recovery.

In 6 months, Sage Mediation designed and delivered multiple day-long workshops in Colombo together with experts from other jurisdictions. The team worked together to train Sri Lankan in-house counsel on mediation advocacy, equip Sri Lankan senior lawyers and arbitrators with mediation skills, and prepare newly employed mediation centre administrators to manage in-person and online mediation.

On the side of those workshops, Sage Mediation also met with young Sri Lankan students from distinguished law schools. Many were heartened by Sage Mediation’s experience in achieving meaningful resolutions for seemingly intractable disputes. It was evident that they were searching for a quality of lawyering different from the old adversarial models.

While the initiative met with some legislative impediments around the recognition of mediation as a formal and legitimate process, Sri Lankan policymakers eventually embraced the vision of efficient and effective justice. Less than 2 years from when the project was first launched, the Sri Lankan government announced that it was readying its own Mediation Act and getting ready to sign the UNCITRAL Convention on Mediation.