Last Month, I had the privilege of spending four days at Maxwell Chambers, Singapore, with Senior Fellows of the Weinstein International Foundation (WIF) from five continents. I am truly grateful to Judge Daniel Weinstein, the WIF leadership and the Regional Project Directors for putting this together, and to all the WIF Senior Fellows who were so generous with their stories.
For context: Judge Danny Weinstein (Ret.) built one of the largest private ADR institutions in the world, and then established WIF to prevent and manage conflict through mediation globally. To sit in a room with him and with people who have been mediating for 30+ years was a solid learning experience. I went with two goals: learn from the best, and put India's ODR story on the table. What follows are my own takeaways from those four days; organised so they are useful to fellow mediators, lawyers and ADR enthusiasts back home.
Mediation is not new. Around 2500 BC, the king of Kish mediated a land dispute in Mesopotamia. Very similar to how we have the story of Lord Krishna mediating between the Kauravas and the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. Four and a half thousand years later, mediators across the world are asking two simple questions: how do we get cases, and how do we get paid?
This was the most sobering realisation of the summit, and it holds across countries and continents, including countries that already have a mediation law, accreditation and structured training.
The economics are brutal. Many accredited mediators earn more as trainers than as mediators. For some, mediation takes 80 per cent of their effort and produces a fraction of their income. And in many jurisdictions, litigation remains the default simply because mediation is still perceived as the lesser craft.
Even where the money exists, it is concentrated. Singapore has this problem. Australia has it. We have it in India. A few names get the work; everyone else gets the certificate. Even at the world's largest ADR institutions, parties don't call asking for "a mediator"; they ask for a specific person, by name. The institution doesn't appoint; the party does.
I personally believe that mediators should be millionaires! At Sama, one of our primary goals is to make mediation a commercially viable profession. Presently, the average income of Sama Mediator is between 9k to 21k per month; we aim to increase the demand for mediation and accordingly improve the pay for mediators in India.
Mediation is a word-of-mouth market. The system will not send you cases. The mediators who built thriving practices did it on their own: they had breakfast with lawyers, asking to be tried, one case at a time. Two related points that stayed with me:
Lawyers are the channel, not the enemy. Law schools and lawyers are the 80:20 of mediation. If you win them, you win the market.
Lawyers do well in mediation. In a good mediation, both lawyers walk out as heroes, because they got their clients a resolution faster and more affordably. It also frees them up to take on more cases. That is actually the sales pitch to the Bar.
This one surprised me. In the USA, parties often prefer Municipal Judges to Supreme Court judges as mediators, because they speak the language of the dispute. Subject-matter expertise beats seniority.
Some judges make wonderful mediators. Some don't. And predicting which is which turns out to be far harder than anyone expects; sometimes the stiffest judge on the bench blossoms in the mediation room.
So judges need training too. Judge Weinstein shared that they started a mediation course for judges. Its title says it all: "You are not wearing a robe anymore." And when a judge refers a case to mediation, she should prepare the parties and nudge them. A referral without a nudge is paperwork. A referral with a nudge is a settlement.
A pattern I now see clearly across countries:
ADR in the United States started with the insurance industry.
ODR started with eBay.
In India, ODR started with banks.
Wherever mediation has scaled, an industry with a volume problem got there before the judiciary did. Industries play a major role in ADR and ODR adoption, and we should design for them.
A small note for founders in this space. Venture investors have historically steered ODR companies away from court systems and towards e-commerce and large private players like banks, because the sales cycle with courts is slow. It is important to have very clear governance non-negotiables before an ADR/ODR company takes VC money.
This was the richest theme of the summit, so I have broken it into trends, opportunities and cautions.
Trends
90% of mediations in the United States are now online. That shift took just six years.
Online mediation for family disputes is the hottest category: five startups in the US in three years. Divorce online? Fair enough-many of these relationships started online too.
Opportunities
Scale. With AI handling the admin, one mediator can now realistically handle 1,000 cases a year.
Language. Two parties can participate in their own languages with live translation between them. For India, this is huge.
Neutrality. The perceived neutrality of AI is remarkably high. Parties who will argue endlessly with a human about a number will often accept the very same number from a machine. AI can settle arguments humans cannot, not because it is wiser, but because nobody suspects it of taking sides.
Training. This is the clearest win. In AI training, a mediator can be put in a room with two AI parties and will not get certified until he clears five simulations with a score above 80. One can also play the party. Basically, a trainee mediator can now fail a hundred times before a real family sits across the table.
Cautions
AI can say "I'm so sorry, I care." It is lying. It doesn't care. We can even imagine a grim business model emerging: the rich get human mediation, the poor get AI. In a world where every app claims to care, the mediator who actually does becomes the scarcest thing in the room. Human empathy is about to be the most precious commodity in this profession.
The machines are coming from the other side too. A 100-page AI-generated complaint cannot be read by a human. We cannot provide human-powered services to AI-generated complaints. We will have to summarise them with AI and confirm with the parties: are these your three real points?
We have ethical codes for neutrals and for ADR institutions. We have none yet for the people writing the code.
A widely-quoted piece of advice from one of the world's best-known legal futurists: if your legal practice has only 3-5 more years left in it, don't bother learning these AI tools; you can survive without them. If it has more, invest in them now.
My aim was simple: show that ODR works. Not just for small, simple disputes, but for high-complexity ones and for emotional, relationship-based ones too. So I presented Sama in three slides: three years, three million disputes resolved online, three categories.
ODR for banks, where India's largest private lenders route consumer disputes to online mediation.
ODR for a regulator, through SEBI's SMART ODR portal.
ODR for police, where women's help desks in Madhya Pradesh referred family disputes for online mediation that would otherwise become FIRs.
The room was impressed by how far India has already gone in adopting ODR, and I was proud to share it. The timing could not be better either: on August 27, 2026, the Mediation Council of India also got notified!
The best craft advice I took home from the week: perspective-getting beats perspective-imagining. Don't imagine what the other person feels. Ask. The reason we don't is confidence: once you believe you have understood someone, you stop asking.
That is true in a mediation room, and it is true of institutions. India has 30+ ADR and ODR institutions. We can all learn from each other. China's 40+ commercial mediation bodies just did exactly that: they sat together and published the Xiamen Consensus, twenty shared principles for the whole industry. Worth a read!
The same humility applies to technology. It should not speed up every case. Sometimes the right thing is to slow one down. The machine is not there to replace the mediator. It is there to take care of the admin work, so the mediator gets to do the part that matters: show real human empathy to people in conflict.
Suljhao, Magar Pyaar Se. (Resolve, with compassion.)
Pranjal Sinha is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sama, one of India's largest online dispute resolution institutions, and a Senior Fellow of the Weinstein International Foundation.
Views are personal.