Second Week at AIA

At the beginning of this past week I found out that my paper proposal was accepted by the Warsaw Conference Committee, which is very exciting. Thus, the majority of my time in the office was spent writing, and editing, and editing, and editing my speech. After far too many drafts, I'm confident it is both informative, and more importantly deliverable. However, I still need to practice it. I have also been doing a lot of research on the topic so that I can participate actively in the question and answer sessions. I will speaking about multi-step dispute resolution in the United States in general, and in particular under the auspices of the American Arbitration Association. Basically, multi-step dispute resolution is when two parties, when entering into a contract, decicde that if any conflict should arise down the road, they will agree to try and negotiation through it themselves, before proceeded to more "adversarial" methods. Hence, there are two steps. It is much more interesting than it sounds, trust me. And, with no background (nor potential future) in contract law, I can still appreciate its theoretical relation to diplomatic communications.

I also made a lot of progress with the EMTPJ project, which is scheduled to be held in August. With a list of nearly every major mediation center in the EU, I set up a sort of phone booth for myself in the office and began calling and giving them AIA's pitch to join. At times I felt a bit like I was a telemarketer, but most were very excited to be a part of the initiative so very little convincing was needed. The biggest point I had to emphasize is that AIA is not a competing mediation institute, but rather a non-profit organization that is trying to universalize the practice of mediation across the EU. With the grant received the EU commission, the goal is the unite all "practitioners of justice" with a single mediation accreditation. It is definitely a bold project, especially seeing as once we have the EU under the umbrella, the idea is to expand it into India, several countries in Asia, and perhaps the US as well.

For February's newsletter, I have been editing several articles from our regular contributors. Many of them are case studies on big international arbitration cases, so the legal terms can be confusing. My boss is motly concerned with whether or not the English makes sense, since most of the contributors are not native English speakers. In order to perhaps make the newsletter more interesting, I have been contacting arbitrators and mediators from different countries and with varying backgrounds to see if they would be willing to have a brief phone interview with me to be included in the newsletter. I have received on reply, from an arbitrator in Los Angeles, with whom I will speak next Tuesday. At the end of the week I put together the questions I will ask him, which mostly deal with multi-step dispute resolution. I did this purposefully, so that I may be able to use some of his insights in my paper.