C o n f l i c t    M a n a g e m e n t    C o n s u l t a n t s

Conflict Management Consultants is a business unit of Skinner & Associates which was established in the late 1990s to provide a sophisticated alternative to dispute resolution by the traditional litigation path. To that end we set out to be able to, and now can, offer a variety of services to help people manage and resolve disputes which may touch upon their lives. As well as offering standard mediation we can facilitate meetings for clients or provide coaching to assist parties to prepare for negotiations or other difficult conversations that they may need to have. We can help organisations to design appropriate systems for dispute management to ensure that disputes are managed at the lowest level both when measured in monetary terms and also in terms of the emotional cost to the staff involved.

If you are already involved in litigation we can advise on alternatives which may be available and/or negotiate directly on your behalf with the other party or parties involved. In this option it is not our intention to replace any current legal adviser. In many cases those advisers would have greater subject matter knowledge than us and often greater experience in the relevant jurisdiction. Our value lies in being able to approach the problem from a completely different perspective using an entirely different skill set. This model has been referred to as the 2 Armies Approach. The litigation team keeps the pressure on while the settlement team explores options for resolution which fall short of a court hearing.

The 2 Armies Model speaks eloquently of our philosophy. It is consistent both with principled negotiation as developed at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and with one of the most admired texts on strategy ever written The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Whilst we believe that you should always consider negotiating first sometimes, after thorough investigations and mature reflection, you are actually better off not negotiating at all. In those circumstances you just need to win.