Over the last years the expectations of Belgian clients have changed and the Flemish lawyer needs to adapt his positioning. Clients are looking for a personalized solution that not only provides a solution for the substantive (pure legal) aspect of the dispute, but also meets, at least takes into account, the more emotional and relational aspects of the conflict.
In collaborative negotiation (also called principled or interest-based negotiation), the approach is to treat the relationship as an important and valuable element while seeking an equitable and fair agreement for all parties.
As part of the collaborative law method, each party engages its own specially trained Collaborative attorney whose job consists in helping to settle the dispute outside the court. If one of the parties however decides to go to court, the collaborative law process terminates and both attorneys are disqualified from any further involvement in the case.
The Association of French- and German-speaking Bars of Belgium has integrated collaborative law in its code of ethics. The Association of Dutch speaking Bars of Belgium looks in which way collaborative law can also become a part of the practice of the Flemish lawyer.

Taking the recent European Commission’s Report on the application of Mediation Directive 2008/52/EC as a starting point, the authors set out to reconstruct the pattern of ADR/mediation activities undertaken by the EU and the Council of Europe over the past 40 years. The authors conclude that the European initiatives have been conducive to a broadening and deepening of the ADR debate. Remarkable shifts can be observed in the emphasis placed by the European agencies during this period, notably a shift from emancipatory to efficiency-based arguments. The inherent coupling of private mediation and public adjudication entails risks however for each of these distinct conflict resolution strategies. The authors call for advanced research designs to generate the data needed for a genuine evidence-based policy in this domain.

It is often assumed business mediation in The Netherlands is not used to its full potential. This article reports on 17 interviews with lawyers from leading Dutch business law firms about their considerations regarding mediation. Most reasons mentioned to turn to mediation are in line with the advantages of mediation described in the literature. Unique positive considerations are: (i) mediation may serve as a substitute for confidential discussions between lawyers and (ii) a mediator may help to sidetrack the sub-standard lawyer on the other side. Reasons mentioned to refrain from mediation are: (i) attempts to resolve the conflict have already been made at various hierarchical levels of the companies involved; (ii) for lawyers with adequate negotiation skills a mediator has little added value; (iii) parties require a formal judgement; (iv) mediation implies some sort of compromise; (v) lack of trust between parties; (vi) not knowing any sufficiently skilled business mediators.