The National Mediation Centre (Pusat Mediasi Nasional - PMN) hosted a seminar titled "Forcing People to be 'Reasonable'" in Jakarta today.
The speaker at today's session, Patrick Cavanagh, is a senior advisor to PMN as well as an academic, mediator and practicing barrister in Australia/New Zealand. Patrick shared his thoughts on how Courts assess what constitutes reasonable efforts to resolve disputes, how the requirement to demonstrate reasonable efforts helps the Courts, and what strategies can be adopted to force parties to be reasonable.
Patrick also made some observations on how Indonesia's changing demographics would impact on formal and informal dispute resolution here. He noted that the most common method of dispute resolution is walking away, and predicted that Indonesia's growing middle class will become less willing to do so as they develop an increased level of interest in their legal rights. He anticipated that placing heavier burdens on both formal (Courts) and informal dispute resolution, and that legal service providers will be forced to "do more for less".
Patrick noted that these are global trends, and that there are new opportunities for those that recognise this at an early stage.