Julian is the founder and Director for Littleton Evans Mediation, a specialist conflict and dispute resolution company, based in Reading, Berkshire (operates UK-wide for most dispute types). He began in dispute resolution 16 years ago, part-time, but now does it full-time and has a large number of successful cases under his belt. Over the years, he has matured into a well qualified, well experienced and highly motivated mediator and gains a great deal of satisfaction in helping people deal with their conflicts, enabling them to get on with their lives and save a good deal of wasted management time, wasted money and unnecessary anxiety compared with traditional methods of conflict resolution, like litigation or HR procedures.
Prior to setting up Littleton Evans, Julian gained 25 years of broad-based experience ranging from: the public to private sectors; commercial and business to regulatory work; design to project management; construction, property and regeneration to development planning; and community to political engagement. Julian worked throughout this period in a legal environment, with frequent and extensive involvement with solicitors. For the last 10 of those years, he combined the role of a senior manager and budget holder in the construction, regeneration and development planning profession with a voluntary role as chief negotiator for staffing issues – these roles were within the same organisation, which was a corporate. It was in that context that he honed his mediator skills, for both commercial and workplace disputes and his employer paid for him to become a professionally qualified mediator. Three successive chief executives appreciated working with Julian because he made their life so much easier with his balanced approach to resolving issues.
In recognition of all this experience, he was elected to the Board in the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce Group. He is also on his local committee of the Federation of Small Businesses and sits on two further boards. These positions give Julian a particularly valuable insight into, and an appreciation of, the inside issues facing a multiplicity of business sectors in this vibrant economic region – helpful knowledge for mediations.
Medation Qualifications
Julian has been accredited by the 'premier league' ADR Group and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. He also has legal training (but is not a solicitor) and a coaching qualification. Julian is possibly unique in the mediation community, being triple accredited for: civil and commercial cases; employment and workplace cases; and family cases. Being accredited in these three areas of mediation makes him ideally suited to deal with both the hard-nosed commercial realities of disputes as well as the more sensitive interpersonal aspects which often accompany them. To top all this, he has achieved the exclusive status of 'Certified Mediator' with the International Mediation Institute, based in The Hague, the international city of peace. This is an "endorsement of a practicing commercial mediator with extensive experience and high competency standards comparable to accreditations agreed across the world". "A value of IMI Certification is that you can trust the competency of an unknown mediator - it takes away the guesswork".
Main Mediation Practice Areas
Although Julian is qualified to deal with practically any kind of dispute, he does have key specialist areas, due to his background professional and personal experience, as follows:
-
Issues over contracts, defects, payments, design, construction and negligence;
-
Troubled relationships on long-term projects or with supply chains where collaboration is essential;
-
Tensions at derector, board and shareholder levels;
-
Workplace and employment issues between staff and teams, organisational change;
-
Family business, dissolution and divorce;
-
Property issues, landlord and tenant, boundary disputes;
-
Development planning issues, local government, regulatory and political; and
-
General business and commercial.
Client Feedback
The following is a direct copy of a feedback summary prepared by a solicitor, senior mediator and chartered arbitrator who saw all Julian's client feedback forms and is included on the public web listing of certified mediators of the International Mediation Institute (IMI):
"This feedback digest is based on feedback that I have seen and also my own personal experience of working with Julian on a civil and commercial to family and business mediation course very recently.
Julian has twenty-five years experience of working in the public and private sector. He is unusual, in that he is accredited as a civil and commercial and workplace mediator and also now as a family and business mediator. He now operates through his own mediation company.
It is reported that and I have seen for myself that he has all the skills of a good mediator. He is an excellent communicator and good at handling strong emotions. He has an infectious enthusiasm and energy; he is extremely interested in and good with people. He is also a very good listener and strong on control of the mediation process. Although not a lawyer, he has enough knowledge in this area to be an effective mediator.
In approach, he is thus able to use a wide range of skills to be facilitative where this kind of light touch is necessary and yet to challenge the positions of the parties where this is necessary.
Feedback that I have seen includes:
" A calming influence and in control, even when emotions were high ".
" He had the ability to gain the confidence of both parties and make them concentrate on the heart of the case "
" He was approachable, friendly, easy to talk to and understanding. This quickly built rapport and put us at ease. "
This is in accordance with my own experience of Julian. There has been no negative feedback relating to Julian over the last two years.
Julian is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, London, CEDR Exchange and the Family Mediators Association.
I commend Julian to IMI.
Michael Cover, Solicitor, Accredited Mediator and Chartered Arbitrator"