Arts Mediation Group

Arts Mediation Group offers mediation services to individuals, organizations, and businesses in all fields of arts and entertainment — performing arts, visual arts, literary arts — whether nonprofit or commercial. Arts Mediation Group also serves the general business community and the nonprofit world when the dispute or issue needing resolution involves artistic or intellectual property issues.

Our goal is to support artistic expression and creative enterprise by enabling parties in dispute to resolve conflict in a collaborative rather than an adversarial manner. The Group’s expertise combines extensive mediation skills and experience with a deep knowledge of intellectual property issues (including copyrights and trademarks), commercial negotiation and litigation, and backgrounds in the performing arts and arts administration.

We recommend reading the following guide before you hire a mediator:

Choosing a mediator

Because there are many different approaches to mediation, you should have a clear idea about what you need from a mediator. To find out whether a candidate can really meet those needs, it will be useful to think of your first meeting as a sort of interview. During the first session you will also get a sense of what it is like for the parties to be in the same room discussing the particulars of the conflict. In deciding on a mediator, the most important criterion by far is whether or not you and the other parties feel the candidate can understand you and the issues in question.

Here is a sample of questions that can help you clarify the mediator’s orientation. [Read more]

Adapted from A Guide to Divorce Mediation, by Gary J. Friedman, cofounder and co-director of The Center for Understanding in Conflict & The Center for Mediation in Law.