Mediators charge £500 an hour – and want to mediate in the workplace!
I recently came upon an article in The Mediator online magazine that makes the astounding claim that mediators have “priced their services at too low a rate” and have set “prices at an inefficient level which does the market little credit”. It goes on to say “as a proportion of the legal spend in a case, the mediator’s fee is often so small that doubling it would make little difference”. http://www.themediatormagazine.co.uk/features/10-survey/32-wrong
The author goes on to quote mediation fees that ought to make these mediators blush: hourly rates in excess of five hundred pounds, and fees for million pound disputes of averaging over £4000 (that’s for an eight hour day). The mediators that the author refers to are commercial mediators, mostly lawyers, whose aim, he says, ought to be “achieving parity with the highest paid lawyers in room is a minimum obligation to the profession”.
What commercial mediators can get away with charging their clients is no business of mine. What I have a very strong view about is that the commercial mediation world has now targeted workplace mediation as their next revenue stream. Events from the CMC is a good example of this intention, in that the only mediation sector this ‘independent’ body (with an executive committee composed almost entirely of lawyer mediators) now seeks to regulate is workplace mediation. They were forced to abandon any idea of regulating their own sector in response to the outrage from their peers: “The objectors [to the CMC’s proposed regulatory-type schemes and codes] were largely experienced, well-known mediators… They objected variously on the grounds of cost, over-regulation, unnecessary regulation, and questioned whether the CMC was the right body to register and regulate mediators.”
Commercial mediators may find that today’s employers are not prepared to pay lawyer rates for a service that is not legal advice and that they themselves acknowledge is a different discipline that requires new skills – and, in my view, values that must be at odds with the ‘winning’ ‘defending’ and ‘prosecuting’ values that trainee lawyers imbibe at law school and hone in their practice as lawyers, barristers and judges. If these mediators really think that the public sector is going to shell out the equivalent of half the annual salary for a nurse’s or police officer, to resolve a dispute that can be resolved just as, if not more, effectively at a far more reasonable rate by a workplace mediation professional, they are living in some kind of parallel universe to mine.
The Mediator article comments that, if mediators did raised their fees to bring them in line with lawyer fees, they “would, however, open themselves up to criticism for greed”. You don’t say.