Graham Ross
Boardroom Resolve is a specialised service of Graham Ross, a lawyer, accredited business mediator and negotiator. Graham is a panel member of the Association of Northern Mediators and of Promediate as well as being registered as a mediator with The Civil Mediation Council.
As a mediator Graham specialises in disputes between shareholders. He has developed novel techniques within the field of Interest-Based Mediation which operates beyond the traditional areas of compromise by helping each party to the dispute to consider interests they may have that, whilst peripheral to the main issue, can be affected adversely as a consequence of the dispute not being resolved, no matter what the outcome of the litigation. By focusing on identifying all interests, including those not obviously linked, that may be impacted by the continuation of the dispute and examining in detail the potential damage each side may suffer on the absence of agreement, the parties themselves then begin to express their own desire to resolve the matter between themselves. In other words, he works to bring the parties to the point where it is they, the parties in dispute, who begin to press for settlement, not the mediator seeking to coax them into it.
In 2014 Graham was appointed a member of the 12 strong ODR (Online Dispute Resolution) Advisory Group appointed by the Civil Justice Council (a public body established under the Civil Procedure Act 1997 with responsibility for overseeing and co-ordinating the modernisation of the civil justice system of England and Wales) to advise on the role of ODR in a modernised civil justice system for England and Wales. Subsequently he was appointed to the Civil Justice Council’s Working Party on Alternative Dispute Resolution.
Graham's work in ODR has led to his appointment as a Fellow of the National Center of Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR) at the University of Massachusetts and a Board Member of the International Council for Online Dispute Resolution (www.ICODR.org) . He developed the leading training course in applying technology to ADR (www.ODRtraining.com) and, as such, has trained mediators from over 20 countries as well as developing and delivering a course for the Milan Chamber of Arbitration and for the UK Ministry of Justice.
Graham has been an advisor to court services in the UK , Bulgaria, Lithuania and Canada as well as to the Council of Europe, on applying technology tools to improve ADR. He currently (2022) is working under contract to advise the courts in Ukraine.
In 2022 Graham was appointed as an Official Observer to the European Cyberjustice Network, a body comprising of the justice systems of the 46 Member States of the Council of Europe.
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Graham has been appointed as Head of International Marketing by leading ODR developers Smartsettle Resolutions of British Columbia.
Graham was the co-author of the European chapter in “Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice” and which was published in 2010 (Eleven Publishing - ISB 9490947253), and has been described as "a state-of-the-art overview and assessment of the status quo and future of the Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) field."
Graham speaks regularly at international conferences on the impact of the law on the Internet and e-commerce and on technology in the judiciary and Alternative Dispute Resolution. He has been presenting regularly at conferences on ODR since 2002 when the now annual International Forum on Online Dispute Resolution was first launched at the Palais Des Nations in Geneva by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. The Forum, which has traveled around five continents, was hosted by Graham in 2007 at the University of Liverpool. He has spoken at events in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria , Poland, Croatia, USA, France, Argentina, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and Azerbaijan, where he chaired the workshop on ODR at the Internet Governance Forum. In 2012 Graham was invited by the European Commission to attend an expert group round table in Brussels on introducing a new European Law on Alternative Dispute Resolution and ODR for Business to Business disputes across Europe.
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