
On 22 January 2021, we at Core celebrated the 20th anniversary of our launch. To mark the occasion and to encourage the next generation, we invited young professionals who are really interested in mediation to take part in The Core Challenge.
We invited participants to submit a short (up to 1000 words) presentation on this topic:
“What one change would make a real difference and increase the use of mediation in civil and commercial cases in Scotland?”
The standard of the entries was uniformly high which made making a decision more challenging. However, for an entry which was a bit different, persuasively written, contained a compelling personal story and in particular focused on an important area, namely fear of failure among those advising clients, The Core @ 20 Prize has been awarded to Sarah-Jane Macdonald of Gillespie Macandrew LLP.
The five runners up will each receive a copy of Dr Anna Howard’s recently published and important book on EU Cross-Border Commercial Mediation. They are Mitchell Abbott (CMS), Megan Anderson (Anderson Strathern), Lorna MacFarlane (Dentons), Amy Roberts (CMS) and Hikari Saito (PhD student at the University of Aberdeen).
View the entries here.
Core hosted an event in association with Young Mediators on Tuesday 18 May to showcase each of the entries and to provide a forum for the entries to be discussed with the audience (hopefully enabling them to be synthesised into a single overall presentation to policy-makers).
John Sturrock commented: “It’s inspiring to see the next generation of professionals really engaging with mediation in such thoughtful and sophisticated ways. It’s been a privilege to read the ideas in each of these excellent entries. I hope policy-makers will take notice of the proposals. And I am delighted that Young Mediators are co-hosting the event in May as the next generation has so much to contribute.”