Mediation in Britain, CEDR: How £12,000 of Seed Capital Built a Multi-Billion-Pound Industry

The story of modern mediation in Europe is best begun not with some statute or directive, but with one very specific scene. London, 1989, the venue of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). In the hall are 300 people: lawyers, business representatives, officials. On the stage is a young lawyer, Eileen Carroll, who has just scraped together £12,000 from two accounting firms, six law offices and four companies. That money was enough for exactly one dedicated telephone line and some office supplies. That day she was presenting an idea that, at the time, seemed almost exotic to the British legal world — institutionalised commercial mediation.

Today the organisation that was born from that meeting — the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution, CEDR — administers thousands of cases a year, and the mediation market that it essentially created in Britain is valued at £20 billion a year by the aggregate value of the cases that pass through the mediation process. This story is interesting not merely as a fact from a textbook: it shows how institutions shape the culture of dispute resolution — and it is instructive for anyone in Ukraine today who is thinking about the development of mediation as a profession and an industry.

Two Founders and One Idea Nobody Believed In

Officially, CEDR was founded in 1990 as an independent non-profit organisation — with the support of the CBI and a number of British companies and law firms. But behind the dry formula “founded with the support of” stand two specific people.

At the moment she launched the idea, Eileen Carroll was a transatlantic partner at a law firm and already had experience taking part in initiatives to create alternative dispute resolution. She understood the main thing: the idea would not work without a system for training mediators, and there would be no training without funding. She went to consult the best American mediation trainers to understand how to present the concept and how much money was really needed. The result was that very launch at the CBI in 1989, soon after which — now formally, in 1990 — the CEDR organisation appeared.

The second founder was Karl Mackie, a barrister by profession (a barrister is a higher-tier advocate in England and Wales who has the right to represent clients in the higher courts and to make oral argument, as opposed to a solicitor, who handles the case at the preparatory stages and, as a rule, does not appear in court) and a psychologist by training — a unique combination that would later become his signature trait as a mediator: the ability to see, at the same time, the legal structure of a dispute and the psychological dynamics of the conflict between people. He became CEDR’s first executive director. Eileen Carroll joined him as deputy CEO in 1996. Later they married — a rare case in which the co-founders of an institution become a family, going on to develop a shared cause over decades.

In 2010 Karl Mackie received a state honour — Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) — for services to mediation. This was the first and still the only case in which the British state has honoured someone specifically as a mediator, with the wording “for services to mediation” in the official list of awards for the Queen’s Birthday. In 2013 Eileen Carroll was granted the honorary status of Queen’s Counsel Honoris Causa — for “an outstanding career as a commercial mediator and a unique contribution to the development of mediation within the civil justice system over the past two decades.” Two people who began with £12,000 and a telephone line received the highest marks of recognition the British state can give to members of a profession that formally did not even exist when they started.

The Moment Mediation Stopped Being an “Alternative”

The most interesting thing in CEDR’s story is not so much its founding as the way the organisation turned mediation from a marginal practice into an element built into the very architecture of the English civil process. This happened in stages, and each stage deserves separate analysis: this same “from practice to system” logic is set out in detail in the Ukrainian context in my book “Be Your Own Mediator,” because without understanding how Britain travelled this path, it is difficult to build an analogous route here. The print edition is available in the online store Epicentr, and the electronic version is on Amazon.

At first CEDR focused exclusively on Britain — in the early 1990s, mediation in commercial disputes was there a virtually unknown practice. Through campaigns, training and constant public advocacy, CEDR began to influence the judges themselves and the justice system as a whole.

In 1996 the then Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Harry Woolf (later chair of CEDR’s International Advisory Board), published the report “Access to Civil Justice,” in which he directly called for wider use of alternative dispute resolution. The report formed the basis of the new Civil Procedure Rules, adopted in 1999 — and here a truly powerful instrument appears: these rules allowed judges to impose costs sanctions on a party that unreasonably refused ADR.

But a rule on paper is one thing, and a precedent that shows how it works in practice is quite another. And that precedent was the case Dunnett v Railtrack Plc [2002] EWCA Civ 303.

The Case About Horses That Changed English Law

The essence of the case is simple and at the same time emotionally charged. The claimant, Mrs Dunnett, lost her horses, which were killed on railway tracks, and brought a claim against the railway company Railtrack. The court of first instance dismissed her claim. When she was granted permission to appeal, a judge of the Court of Appeal advised the parties to try mediation — exactly as the Civil Procedure Rules now expressly provide. Railtrack refused, explaining its position on the grounds that mediation “would inevitably have meant paying money over and above what they had already offered.” The claimant ultimately lost the appeal.

And here the court did something that had hardly ever happened before: despite the fact that Railtrack had formally won the case, the Court of Appeal refused the company its costs — precisely because of its unwillingness to try mediation. In his reasoning, Lord Justice Brooke wrote words that have since been quoted by every British ADR textbook: skilled mediators are able to achieve results that are utterly beyond the reach of the court and the lawyers; there are cases where emotions run so high — such as the loss of horses, or disputes against the police — that what the claimant actually needs is not money but a sincere apology, and it is precisely mediation that is capable of giving what a court judgment cannot.

This case became precedent number one in British practice on “costs for refusing mediation.” A series of clarifying decisions followed — in particular, Halsey v Milton Keynes General NHS Trust [2004] EWCA Civ 576. Formally these were two joined appeal proceedings: in the first, the widow Lillian Halsey sued a hospital over the death of her husband and insisted that the hospital had unreasonably declined several of her invitations to mediation; in the second, a claimant sought to recover costs from the defendant for a similar refusal in a case about the consequences of two successive road accidents. The Court of Appeal, composed of Lords Justices Dyson, Ward and Laws, refused in both cases, since the defendants had a sufficiently strong legal position, while the claimants themselves had not proved that mediation really had a genuine chance of success. But far more important than the outcome was the reasoning: Lord Justice Dyson formulated six criteria by which the unreasonableness of a refusal to mediate would thereafter be assessed — the nature of the dispute (whether it is at all suitable for negotiation, rather than only for a judicial interpretation of the law), the strength of the party’s legal position, the extent to which other attempts at settlement have already been exhausted, whether the cost of mediation is disproportionately high compared with the value of the dispute, whether mediation would cause an unjustified delay to the proceedings, and, finally, whether the procedure had a real prospect of success. These “Halsey factors” still remain the basic test that English courts apply in disputes over costs, and Dyson himself added a fundamental caveat: the court may encourage the parties to mediate but has no right to compel them to do so — compulsion, in his view, would violate the right of access to justice.

It was precisely this last proposition — that the court cannot compel mediation — that was overturned by Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council [2023] EWCA Civ 1416, which appeared almost twenty years later. The story began quite mundanely: Japanese knotweed (an invasive plant) spread onto the plot of homeowner James Churchill from the neighbouring land belonging to the Merthyr Tydfil municipality and caused damage to his property. Instead of turning straight to the council’s internal complaints procedure, Churchill filed a claim in court. The council demanded that the proceedings be stayed for three months in order to make the claimant first go through this internal procedure, but the judge at first instance refused, relying precisely on the position from Halsey on the impermissibility of compelling ADR. The council’s appeal reached the Court of Appeal, and a whole range of interveners joined the case — among them the Law Society, the Bar Council, the Civil Mediation Council, the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and CEDR itself. The Court of Appeal held that this very proposition by Dyson in Halsey had been merely an incidental observation (obiter dictum), not part of a binding decision, and that in fact the courts do have the power to stay proceedings or to directly order the parties to attempt an out-of-court resolution of the dispute — provided that this does not deprive a party of fair access to justice and remains proportionate to the circumstances of the case. Following this decision, the Civil Procedure Rules were supplemented with paragraph 1.1(2)(f), which expressly allows the court to proactively promote alternative dispute resolution. An illustrative example of how this worked in practice is the high-profile court case of the retailer Superdry, which the court referred to mediation despite the resistance of one of the parties, and which ultimately did end in a settlement agreement.

This legal line is examined in such detail for a reason: it — and not simply a “good reputation” — is the real explanation of why CEDR turned from a small charitable initiative into an institution that defines the face of an entire industry. The organisation did not merely provide a mediation service — it worked systematically with the judicial system, shaping precedents and the rules of the game for the whole country.

The Figures Everyone Working in Mediation Should Know

Every two years CEDR publishes the CEDR Mediation Audit — the main industry study of the state of the commercial mediation market in Britain, conducted jointly with the Civil Mediation Council. This is probably the most important statistical document in the entire European mediation industry, and anyone who writes or speaks about the state of the field sooner or later refers to it.

The latest, eleventh audit (published in June 2025) recorded 21,000 civil and commercial mediations in Britain over 2023–2024 — a 24% increase compared with the previous period. At the same time, 62% of mediations are once again held in person: the pandemic shift towards the online format has partly rolled back, although online mediation remains a stable norm rather than a temporary phenomenon.

The previous, tenth audit (2023) gives an even more detailed picture: 17,000 cases a year (3% more than the pre-pandemic level) and an impressive settlement rate of 92% (73% of cases were settled with an agreement on the very day of the mediation, and another 20% shortly afterwards). The aggregate value of the cases that pass through the mediation process in Britain each year is estimated at £20 billion. And CEDR estimates the economic effect for business from using mediation instead of the courts at £5.9 billion a year — this is management time saved, legal costs avoided, productivity preserved, and business relationships kept intact that litigation would otherwise have destroyed.

There is an interesting detail for those who think of mediation as a profession, too: the average mediator’s fee for a one-day session is £1,597 for less experienced practitioners and £4,044 for experienced ones. This is significantly lower than it was in 2016 (£4,500) — the market has become more competitive and more accessible, which can be regarded as a healthy sign of its maturity rather than a problem.

Not Just a Service, but a Whole Organism

CEDR’s structure is interesting in itself, because it shows how a charitable organisation can build a sustainable commercial model without losing its mission. The commercial division, CEDR Solve, directly administers cases: its panel has more than 130 accredited mediators, the organisation has advised on more than 16,000 disputes throughout its existence and mediates around 600 major cases a year.

In parallel, CEDR is one of the world leaders in training mediators. Its signature five-day course, “CEDR-Accredited Mediator Skills Training,” is recognised as an international benchmark for the training of commercial mediators; over the years CEDR has trained more than 5,000 mediators from various countries around the world. In 2011 the organisation acquired IDRS Ltd — the dispute resolution service of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators — further strengthening its position.

What is especially important: CEDR is an officially registered British charity (number 1060369), and all profit from its commercial activity is reinvested back into promoting mediation — through events, educational programmes and services that are often provided at cost. This is a model worth studying in its own right: commercial success here is not a contradiction of the charitable mission but an instrument of it.

From London to Beijing

From the mid-1990s, CEDR’s focus began to shift from the purely British to the international. First came the encouragement of mediation’s development in other European countries and work on international cases, and later concrete institutional steps: in 2005 CEDR founded MEDAL, an international alliance of mediation service providers, and soon afterwards created the first international mediation centre in China together with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT) — an eloquent example of how far an idea that began with £12,000 in a London hall can reach.

CEDR is also one of the founding participants of the International Mediation Institute (IMI) — the Hague-based organisation that sets global quality standards for mediators — and has taken part in the work of its board since 2014.

Personal Cases That Became Legends of the Field

Karl Mackie, despite his organisational role, remained a practising mediator throughout all this time — and it was as a practitioner that he received that very CBE award. Among the cases that made him one of Britain’s most influential mediators were the mediation surrounding the Maxwell Pension case, cases connected with the collapse of the BCCI bank, and, more recently, the resolution of Britain’s “horsemeat scandal” in retail — a case in which the reputational crisis of an entire industry demanded not a court judgment but a swift and delicate reconciliation of the interests of many parties at once.

In 2017 Mackie moved from the role of CEO to the new role of Founder President, making way for a new generation of leadership — a symbolic moment of passing the baton in an institution that by then had long outgrown its founders.

Why This Story Matters Right Now

The CEDR case is worth examining not out of nostalgia for British legal history. It is above all an example of how a small initiative with minimal resources — £12,000, one telephone line and the persistence of two people — can, over three decades, change not merely a services market but the very architecture of justice of an entire country. This happened not thanks to one lucky case or clever marketing, but thanks to systematic, long-term work simultaneously at three levels: practice (real mediations), education (training thousands of mediators) and law (systematic work with courts and legislators through concrete precedents such as Dunnett v Railtrack).

Britain spent almost thirty years travelling the path from “mediation is something exotic” to “92% of cases referred to mediation end in settlement.” The question worth asking oneself and one’s colleagues in Ukraine is how much time it will take us — and what exactly we can borrow from this path today.