Measuring a Mediator’s Skill: The Story and Model of the International Mediation Institute

Consider this scenario: a large company’s legal department receives a proposal to resolve a multimillion-euro dispute with a supplier through mediation. Management agrees. But a practical question immediately arises — one that determines the entire outcome: who should be the mediator? The candidates’ CVs look equally convincing. So do their certificates. And there is almost no reliable information about how a specific person actually behaves in the negotiating room during a critical moment.

This is not a hypothetical problem. It is a structural feature of the entire mediation market, which runs on trust built almost exclusively on reputation and personal connections. In 2007, an organisation appeared in The Hague that decided to tackle precisely this problem — not by offering yet another mediation service, but by trying to measure and certify the quality of mediators themselves at a global scale. That organisation is the International Mediation Institute (IMI).

All four organisations discussed earlier in this series — CEDR, the ICC International Centre for ADR, the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, and the EUIPO Mediation Centre — provide mediation services directly. They administer proceedings, appoint mediators, and help parties reach agreements. The International Mediation Institute does none of this. It is a non-profit foundation based in The Hague. Its sole purpose is to establish and maintain global competency standards for mediators, without providing any services to the parties of a dispute itself.

From the idea of three organisations to the registration of a foundation

The idea of combining the efforts of several mediation institutions into a shared global structure emerged in 2006. Mark Appel from the American Arbitration Association, acting through its international arm the ICDR, Annette van Remsdijk from the Netherlands Mediation Institute (NMI), and Loong Seng Ohn from the Singapore Mediation Centre (SMC) jointly planned the creation of an international body that would promote mediation as a full-fledged profession with its own quality standards. A year later, in 2007, this plan materialised as the registration of the International Mediation Institute — a Dutch non-profit foundation in The Hague.

The first chair of the organisation was Michael McIlwrath from General Electric — a company that was at the time an active user of out-of-court dispute resolution. This immediately gave the new structure practical rather than purely academic legitimacy. The person at the top was not a provider of mediation services but someone who regularly commissioned mediation as a client and understood firsthand what the market was missing from a consumer’s perspective.

A key operational role in the organisation’s development was played by Michael Leathes — an experienced professional who, despite plans for retirement, agreed to build IMI from 2007 as a charitable structure, declining any payment for his own work. Over the following decade, Leathes became the organisation’s chief idea generator, from the first concept of global certification to the large-scale research initiatives described below.

The geography of the founders — spanning North America, Western Europe, and Asia — was deliberate. An organisation created by a single regional group risked being seen as a local standard imposed on the rest of the world. Starting with three continents established a genuine claim to global reach, and the location of registration, The Hague, with its longstanding reputation as a centre of international justice and neutrality, only strengthened that effect.

The financial model was planned in advance. AAA/ICDR and SMC, together with the partner Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC), committed to supporting the foundation with grants during its first years of operation. The Dutch NMI contributed its practical expertise. At the time, the Dutch national model for certifying mediators was almost the only well-developed example of such a system in the world, and the newly created foundation drew heavily on that experience.

How the certification system works in practice

IMI’s central operating principle is that the organisation itself neither trains nor assesses anyone directly. Instead, it formulates detailed public competency standards and delegates the actual training and assessment to accredited third-party partners. Training bodies receive the status of Certified Mediator Training Programmes (CMTPs), while assessment bodies receive the status of Qualifying Assessment Programmes (QAPs). Each application for such status undergoes a rigorous review by IMI’s independent advisory committee before gaining the right to issue assessments that count as official certification.

A mediator’s path to certification involves several sequential steps. The details matter, because the value of the system lies precisely in the specifics of the procedure.

The first step is confirming experience. A candidate must prove they are a practising — not merely a recently trained — professional. They must document at least twenty completed mediations or two hundred hours of active practice in the past three years. This threshold immediately filters out everyone who has completed a training course but has not yet handled any real cases.

The second step requires submitting an anonymised case log. The candidate compiles a structured list of conducted mediations without revealing the names of the parties or confidential details of the disputes. The log must contain enough information about the type of case, the industry, the duration of the process, and the general outcome for assessors to understand the mediator’s real practical profile.

The third step is assessment through an accredited QAP programme. This involves preparing and submitting an action plan based on a practical case study — demonstrating how the candidate would structure work on a specific hypothetical but realistic dispute — followed by an assessment session with experienced assessors. They evaluate not theoretical knowledge but practical skills: facilitation, working with parties’ emotions, and building trust in the room.

The fourth step is arguably the most original: the Feedback Digest. This is an anonymised, independently compiled summary of feedback from real clients, gathered through a standardised request form. The mediator chooses an independent reviewer who receives completed forms from the parties of past cases and converts them into a summary text. It contains no names or case details, but it gives an honest picture of how the professional actually works with people in high-stakes situations. This is a systematic, verified equivalent of what the mediation market most often lacks: reliable information about how a specific person works, not merely a list of formal qualifications.

Although the formal obligation to maintain an active Feedback Digest as a condition of retaining certified status has softened over time, the organisation continues to encourage practitioners to keep it current. It directly affects the trust of potential clients and the visibility of a profile in IMI’s internal search system, which legal departments and mediation providers use when looking for the right candidate for a specific case.

Today, more than five hundred certified mediators from forty-five countries have gone through this system. The network of accredited partner organisations spans dozens of bodies across all continents — from the New York-based CPR Institute to the ADR Center Academy in Rome, from Mediation International in Spain to regional centres in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Each retains its own local expertise while applying a single global assessment standard.

Specialised certification pathways

Beyond the core level, IMI has developed several narrower specialisations, each responding to a specific practical market need that has grown large enough to warrant separate recognition.

Cross-cultural competency certification recognises mediators who demonstrate particular skill in working with the intercultural dynamics of conflict. This is a critical skill for cross-border commercial disputes, where differences in cultural communication codes often complicate negotiations as much as the legal substance of the dispute itself. The focus is not on superficial familiarity with the etiquette of different countries. It is a deeper understanding of how cultural context shapes perceptions of fairness, trust, and acceptable forms of compromise.

Mediation advocacy certification (MAQAP) is directed not at mediators but at lawyers and consultants who specialise in representing clients during mediation. This is a distinct and often underestimated skill. An effective mediation advocate works very differently from a courtroom lawyer. Rather than presenting a position as persuasively as possible to a third party who will decide the outcome, the mediation advocate helps their own client hear the other side’s interests and move toward compromise — while still serving as a reliable protector of the client’s interests.

Online mediation certification, assessed through ODRQAP programmes, became especially in demand after 2020, when online mediation shifted from an exotic exception to a standard format for a significant portion of international commercial disputes.

Also worth mentioning is the Young Mediators Initiative — a programme built on an understanding of the classic problem in any highly qualified profession: gaining recognition requires experience, and gaining experience usually requires recognition. The programme gives newcomers the chance to work alongside experienced practitioners on real cases, gradually building the practical background that will eventually allow them to pursue full IMI certification.

The Global Pound Conference: the organisation’s largest research project

The largest research initiative in IMI’s history was the Global Pound Conference series of 2016–2017. The idea grew from a much more modest gathering in 2014 at London’s Guildhall, initiated by Michael Leathes. That event brought together mediation users, in-house and external lawyers, mediators, and academics. Participants answered a series of prepared questions, with responses projected on screen in real time for everyone to see. The results were striking. A clear gap emerged between what lawyers believed their clients wanted and what clients actually wanted. Company executives and in-house lawyers generally felt that mediation should be tried as early as possible after a dispute arises. Many external counsel preferred to hold off until just before a court hearing. This gap goes a long way toward explaining why mediation, despite all its advantages, is still not always the first choice.

The series was named after Roscoe Pound — the Harvard law professor whose 1976 conference is considered a defining moment in the development of alternative dispute resolution in the United States. The Global Pound Conference 2016–2017 launched in Singapore in March 2016 with a two-day opening event and concluded in London in the summer of 2017. It covered around forty cities in more than thirty countries — from Lagos to Mexico City, from New York to Geneva, from Toronto to Madrid. In each city, organisers brought together parties to commercial disputes, chambers of commerce, lawyers, academics, judges, arbitrators, mediators, and government officials. The goal was to discuss what dispute resolution tools should look like in the twenty-first century — including litigation, arbitration, conciliation, and mediation — and to gather concrete data about the real needs of users, not just providers’ assumptions about those needs.

Partners and sponsors included Shell and AkzoNobel, the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, and a range of leading professional bodies: the ICC, CEDR, the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the Beijing Arbitration Commission, the American Arbitration Association, the International Bar Association, and dozens of other industry organisations from across the world. Effectively the entire spectrum of players discussed in this series came together around this research project.

The data collected formed the basis of a series of analytical reports prepared for IMI by the research team at Resolution Resources. They remain one of the largest bodies of empirical data on what participants in commercial disputes actually expect from dispute resolution systems in different regions of the world. After the conference series ended, the platform did not disappear. It transformed into an ongoing research blog and publication series called Global Pound Conversation, which continues to track changes and trends in mediation and alternative dispute resolution globally.

Research, policy, and advocacy: what else IMI does

IMI’s research and advocacy work extends well beyond a single conference, however large. The organisation regularly conducts the Biennial Census Survey — a two-year industry poll that tracks how companies and practitioners perceive the state and development of mediation in different jurisdictions. The data regularly inform public discussions, policy recommendations, and adjustments to IMI’s own certification standards.

A particularly significant area of IMI’s work involves participation in shaping the international legal framework for mediation at the global level. For years, the organisation took part in working group discussions dedicated to developing an international mechanism for enforcing agreements reached through mediation in cross-border commercial disputes. That long-term work contributed to the adoption of the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation — better known as the Singapore Convention on Mediation of 2019. The significance of this document is difficult to overstate. For the first time, it gave mediated settlement agreements a status comparable to the recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards under the 1958 New York Convention. Until that point, the absence of such a mechanism was one of the main reasons why large businesses often chose arbitration over mediation — even when mediation was objectively the better fit for a given dispute. An arbitral award can be enforced in virtually any country in the world. A mediated settlement agreement, until recently, could not.

IMI also developed specific criteria for selecting mediators in investor-state disputes — a specialised but economically significant category of international conflicts where standard commercial mediation credentials are often insufficient. These cases require expertise in public international law and involve particular political sensitivity, often touching on questions of state sovereignty and public interest rather than purely private commercial matters.

The organisation’s publication activity has also been consistent and systematic. Under IMI’s auspices, a series of peer-reviewed articles and accompanying video interviews with their authors was published under the title “Seven Keys to Unlock Mediation’s Golden Age” — twenty-five separate pieces by different authors on specific practical and policy topics in the field’s development. They covered questions such as how to build strong collective leadership in the mediation community; whether the Global Pound Conference should be held regularly, every five to seven years, as a kind of industry pulse check; how to teach mediation in legal education in a way that serves real-world practice rather than remaining an elective subject; how to ensure mediation is recognised as a genuine professional practice on a par with law or the judiciary; how to integrate mediation with arbitration into a single coherent process; how to fully realise the potential of online dispute resolution technology; whether a mediation attempt should be a mandatory prerequisite to civil litigation; and how to implement the Singapore Convention in practice within different national legal systems.

Why this funding model is possible at all

The key reason IMI is perceived as an independent quality arbiter rather than just another commercial brand is straightforward: the organisation does not earn money from specific mediations, because it does not provide mediation services at all. It simply has no structural incentive to pass weak candidates in order to expand the pool of certified practitioners or generate additional revenue.

The foundation is funded primarily by corporate users of mediation and a group of leading international ADR providers — the same organisations that compete with each other for clients in the market. This may seem paradoxical at first glance, but the logic is simple. Competitors are happy to fund a shared independent standards body because they understand that trust in the mediation industry as a whole benefits each individual market player more than any tactical advantage from lowering general quality standards. This kind of self-regulatory model is familiar in other professions — from accounting to law — where competing organisations regularly unite around shared independent standards bodies precisely because no single player gains from general distrust of the profession.

The foundation is governed by a board of directors that includes representatives of both the leading institutional founders and independent industry members selected on the basis of professional reputation rather than formal representation of any specific organisation. This structure is designed to protect decision-making from undue influence by any single commercial player.

IMI’s place among the other organisations in this series

Comparing IMI with CEDR, ICC, WIPO, or EUIPO means comparing a standards system with the specific service providers that operate within it. CEDR, the ICC ADR Centre, WIPO AMC, and the EUIPO Mediation Centre directly administer mediations and bear responsibility for the specific outcome in a specific dispute between specific parties. IMI, by contrast, defines the criteria a mediator must meet. It does so in order that any of these providers — and anyone outside them, including corporate legal departments selecting a mediator without any institutional intermediary — can trust the stated qualifications of a particular professional.

This difference has a practical consequence for how different institutions relate to one another. Instead of competing for clients, IMI effectively functions as a shared trust infrastructure for everyone else. A mediator appointed through CEDR, ICC, or WIPO may well also hold a separate IMI certification — and for the parties to a dispute, this is a double confirmation of qualifications, not a set of mutually exclusive alternatives.

The story of IMI is interesting above all because it demonstrates that not every industry problem is solved by the appearance of yet another service provider. Sometimes the most useful institution is one that takes no part in specific cases at all, but instead holds the quality bar for everyone else through several simultaneous channels: through the certification of individual practitioners, through large-scale research projects like the Global Pound Conference, and through direct participation in shaping international legal policy like the Singapore Convention on Mediation. This is largely invisible work that rarely makes headlines — unlike the high-profile billion-dollar mediations or landmark court cases discussed in earlier articles in this series. But it is precisely on structures like this that trust in an entire profession ultimately rests. And that is why it makes sense to end a survey of mediation institutions with the one that does not itself mediate.