Are Employment lawyers being professionally negligent by ignoring ADR?

Last week I attended 2 events on Friday in which I had some useful contact with lawyers.

From mid morning to the afternoon I attended the Geeklawyer Conference on blogging which has received a significant amount of write-up here. I will briefly add that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Prior to this I attended a networking event at my local Institute of Directors where I entered into discussion with a leading employment lawyer where he observed that solicitors may be committing professional negligence if they do not give their clients the opportunity to consider ADR.

This is strong language but in light of the high success rate of mediation(80% success rate) and the potential costs savings, is this not right?

An added string to the bow is in my experience employment lawyers have a clear knowledge deficit of mediation compared to commercial litigation lawyers.

It needs to be remembered that commercial litigators have more pressure to mediate than employment lawyers. This will change with implementation of the Gibbons Review of dismissal procedures.

True lawyers are used to using ACAS but what about use of mediation?

In the meantime, it is perhaps employment lawyers who need the most mediation training.