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→Resolving the issues
With mediation and negotiation, it's the people at the centre of the dispute who come up with a resolution. Both processes are cooperative since resolution is only possible with everyone's agreement. The parties must commit themselves to a dialogue aimed at settling their disagreements, knowing that neither will get everything they want. There is no winner and no loser.
Arbitration is an adversarial process, just like litigation. However, the person who imposes a resolution on the parties isn't stuck with the rules of court, the way judges are, and can work with the parties to develop faster, more efficient and more cooperative ways of giving evidence and making argumenttheir arguments. There will still be a winner and a loser, but the speed and flexibility of arbitration lets people get to resolution with less damage to themselves and their relationships with each other.
Unless there is a pressing and desperate urgency, in my opinion, negotiation, mediation, and arbitration are generally to be preferred over litigation. Curiously, this view is shared by a lot of other family law lawyers. The Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family published [https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/107586/Cost_of_Dispute_Resolution_-_Mar_2018.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y a study] in 2017 examining the views of 166 lawyers from across Canada on the use of mediation, collaborative negotiation, arbitration, and litigation in family law disputes. These lawyers said that mediation, collaborative negotiation, and arbitration were all faster, more efficient and cheaper than litigation, and that mediation, collaborative negotiation, and arbitration were all more likely to produce results that were in the interests of their clients, and in the interests of their clients' children, than litigation.