The longer I practice, the less sure I am that litigation, arbitration and mediation are really separate things. On paper, they are different disciplines, with different rules and different textbooks. In a client's life, they are the same problem, approached from different chairs.

I have sat in a few of those chairs. As counsel before a court, the question that governs everything is how to persuade the judge. Sitting as an arbitrator, the question changes: not how to persuade, but what the tribunal actually needs in order to decide. At the mediation table, it changes again and becomes the hardest one of all - what would make these parties, who walked in wanting to win, agree to stop. And in trademark work, a fourth question keeps surfacing behind the legal one: is the dispute on the file really the dispute the business is losing sleep over?

Move between those chairs often enough and a suspicion sets in. The client never experienced four disputes. There was only ever one. We are the ones who split it into forums.

That suspicion is what sent me to look closely at the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM). I came with the question the chairs had already raised: why do we keep treating the stages of a dispute as separate worlds when the person paying for it has only one?

ADGM is a small, specialised jurisdiction - a financial free zone with a scale and a mandate nothing like India's constitutional court system. I have no interest in the tired claim that one is 'better' than the other. What is interesting is the design. Its courts apply English common law directly, in English, and were built from the outset as a single digital system rather than a set of institutions bolted together. The thing that stays with me is not the technology. It is that someone sat down and designed around the life of the dispute rather than the boundaries between departments.

The trademark work sharpened that for me more than anything. A trademark fight is, on the file, about infringement, or passing off, or a rival mark on the register. But the business on the other end of the phone is usually worried about something the pleadings never quite capture - whether it can keep using a name, whether two marks can live side by side, how to carry a brand into a new territory without losing the goodwill in the old one. The legal dispute and the commercial dispute are related, but they are not the same. A forum that can decide only the first may leave the second exactly where it was. That gap is where a connected system - one that can move a matter between deciding and settling without starting over - earns its keep.

Take mediation. For most of my career, it has been the thing lawyers reach for late - after the pleadings have hardened and the costs have climbed, when litigation has become painful enough that settlement finally looks attractive. ADGM treats it as part of the ordinary course. Its courts run a court-annexed mediation service in which the court appoints the mediator and a party can ask for a matter to be referred to mediation at almost any stage of the proceedings. What I would borrow is the sequencing: referral is offered early and from inside the litigation, so that trying to settle is a normal step rather than a confession of weakness. And referral is not compulsion; being sent to mediation is not being made to settle. The distinction matters, because a mediation entered under duress is only delay with a nicer name.

India has just taken a big step in the same direction. The Mediation Act, 2023 gives institutional mediation a statutory footing and the courts have gone further. Since Patil Automation, the Supreme Court has treated pre-institution mediation under the Commercial Courts Act as mandatory before many commercial suits can even be filed. In August 2026, the government finally notified the Mediation Council of India, three years after the Act. The scaffolding is going up. The open question - the one ADGM answers with its sequencing - is whether mediation will sit inside the ordinary life of a case, or become one more compulsory gate a litigant clears on the way to the courtroom he wanted all along.

The second thing I would take from ADGM is how it treats case management. To most litigators, that phrase means dates and directions, the administrative housekeeping around the real fight. Watch a well-run system and you see something more. Narrowing the issues, deciding what evidence is actually needed, keeping the timetable proportionate to what is at stake - done seriously, that is not housekeeping; it is part of resolving the dispute. Sitting as an arbitrator taught me this more sharply than any appearance in court: when you are the one who has to decide, you notice how much of the outcome is settled long before the hearing, by whether the issues were framed tightly or left to sprawl. ADGM's procedure rules put that discipline at the centre rather than the edge. Indian courts case-manage too, but the design question is whether we treat it as structured dispute-resolution work or as the part of the file everyone rushes through.

Then there is the digital piece, which is easy to misread. ADGM built what it calls the world's first end-to-end digital court - filing, case record, payments, hearings and judgments running through one platform. It is tempting to shrink that to 'they have online courts', but that misses the point. It would be unfair in a country running the e-Courts project, now in a ₹7,210-crore third phase aimed squarely at digital, paperless courts. India is not short on ambition. The sharper question ADGM raises is this: does going digital merely move paper onto a screen, or does it actually cut friction across the whole arc of a dispute - filing, service, hearing, enforcement - so that the parts connect? Digitising each silo is not the same as designing one road.

Underneath all three is the same idea and it is the one I keep returning to. Court, arbitration and mediation are not rival faiths. They are tools for different disputes and often for different stages of the same dispute. ADGM's Dispute Resolution Hearing Centre, which hosts arbitrations and mediations alongside the courts and even houses the ICC's regional office, is a physical version of that. The forums share a design and a roof instead of competing for the client from separate buildings. I say none of this to romanticise ADGM, which has the luxury of a clean slate and a narrow remit. I say it because the instinct behind it travels even when the institution cannot.

That is what makes ADGM worth an Indian lawyer's attention and it is not the lesson people expect. The lesson is not that India should build more. We are not short of institutions . The harder question is whether, from where the litigant actually stands, those pieces work as one system or as a set of separate kingdoms he has to cross one border at a time. Integration, proportionality and plain usability are less glamorous than launching a new body. They are also what decide whether a person in dispute is helped or merely processed.

The more chairs I have sat in, the less the argument about which forum is 'best' interests me. A court, a tribunal and a mediation table are each good at different things. The skill I still find hardest is matching the process to the dispute in front of me - the right forum, at the right stage, for this client, at a cost that makes sense. ADGM did not teach me that; my own files did. But it showed me what it looks like when a system is built to make that matching easier rather than harder. A good dispute resolution system, in the end, does not give lawyers more forums to choose from. It gives them better choices.

Joel Kenneth Johnson is an advocate practising before the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts.