Cross-cultural
A session in the language the deal was made in.
Some commercial disputes are harder than they need to be because the parties are working in a second language, in a business culture that is not the one the agreement was struck in. That is a resolvable problem and it is rarely treated as one.
What comes up
The disputes.
Commercial matters where the parties, the business or the assets cross a border or a culture.
- Diaspora business succession
- Family-held companies passing between generations where one generation built the business abroad and the next runs it here.
- Dual-jurisdiction shareholder
- Ownership disputes where the company, the shareholders or the assets sit in more than one country.
- Partnership disputes
- Breakdowns between diaspora entrepreneurs, often built on arrangements that were trusted rather than documented.
- Cross-cultural commercial
- Contract and supply disputes where the disagreement is partly about what was actually agreed and partly about how each side expected the other to behave.
- Informal arrangements
- Matters where the commercial substance is real and the paperwork is thin, and the process has to establish what the deal was before it can resolve it.
- Interpreted proceedings
- Matters that have been running through an interpreter, where a session in the parties' own language changes what gets said.
Language
English or Farsi, and the difference is not convenience.
I am bilingual in English and Farsi, so a session can run in either. That is not a service line; it changes what a mediation can do. A party working through an interpreter says less, says it more carefully, and loses the qualifications and the hesitations that a mediator is actually listening for.
It matters most in caucus, which is where a mediation is usually decided. A party explaining to a neutral what they can really live with is doing something delicate, and doing it in a second language, through a third person, is a different and much worse conversation.
Culture
Some of these disputes are about the agreement behind the agreement.
I am Iranian-Canadian, and some commercial disputes are not separable from the relationship between the parties — family-held companies and diaspora businesses in particular. In matters of this kind a significant part of the disagreement is often not about the written contract at all — it is about obligations both sides genuinely believed were understood, and which one side never thought needed writing down.
A neutral who does not recognise that reads the file as one party inventing terms after the fact. A neutral who does can get the real expectations on the table, which is usually the only route to a settlement either side will actually honour.
The frame
The process is still an Ontario commercial process.
These run as commercial mediations and arbitrations, from Toronto, on the rules the parties choose. Where assets or parties sit in another jurisdiction, that is a fact the process has to accommodate — in how an agreement is drafted to be useful in both places, and in who needs to be in the room for a settlement to hold.
A question of another country's law can bear on what a settlement has to say. Each party brings their own advisers for that, here and wherever else the matter reaches, and I work from what they tell me rather than around it.
This site is written in English by design. A page in Farsi would be a different commitment from a session in Farsi, and only the second is offered.
The process
And how it would run.
The area is the subject matter. The process is what the parties are choosing between, and each of these describes one — the formats, the rules, and what a party is expected to do and when.
Next step
Start with a call.
Tell me the shape of the matter and who is involved, and I will tell you whether I am the right neutral for it. Inquiries are answered within two business days.