There’s an old proverb: you can win over a wise man with reason, but you can’t convince a fool with proof. Litigants in person (LiPs) are on the rise, driven in part by the increasingly unaffordable cost of representation. The AI revolution has also armed even the least experienced would-be litigator with a seemingly inexhaustible arsenal of legal tools, available at little or no cost. And with more LiPs, come the vexatious litigators. Take the recent example of Attorney Gene

It's not the orange. The reasons people give as to why they don’t want to mediate are many and varied. I don’t think it will achieve anything. They’re not going to listen. I can’t sit in the same room as them. They're being unreasonable. Call me an old cynic, but I think the real reason is usually that most people think that mediation means compromise. And compromise means giving ground, or making a concession, or – God forbid – apologising for something they don’t need to

Two things are certain now: first, AI is here to stay. Second, AI will shortly be smarter than humans (and, in some respects, already is). This is both exciting and terrifying. Whilst integrating highly intelligent machines into society may beget staggering improvements in the human experience, it remains to be seen whether, when it comes to conflict resolution, AI will be a force for order and justice, or the harbinger of chaos. Looking at the way the conflict resolution lan

During the V-1 flying bomb campaign in 1944, Londoners stared at maps of falling bombs and became convinced the Germans had a strategy. They began looking for areas where bombs didn’t fall — areas where they suspected German spies might be hiding. This suspicion intensified after the first Vergeltungswaffe-1 bomb struck a railway bridge in Mile End on 13 June 1944, killing six people and leaving 200 homeless. Better known as the Vengeance Weapon, or the V-1, the first operati

There is no such country as Finland. This is one of my favourite conspiracy theories, up there with “birds aren’t real” (all birds were replaced by the US government in the seventies with surveillance drones) and the Avril Lavigne replacement theory (Avril Lavigne died in the early 2000s and was – for unclear reasons – quietly replaced by a double). But Finland is particularly good. According to its adherents, Finland is not a nation at all but a cartographic fiction invented

One thing we can probably all agree on: giving feedback is often as hard as receiving it. Sometimes it’s worse. Like that old cartoon of the martinet father disciplining his child — this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you. Sticks and stones, etc. Except that isn’t true. Words hurt. Sometimes just as much as physical pain. The cognitive problem is that our brains, in a desperate attempt to protect us from psychological or social harm, run an internal narrativ

For a long time, I tried to avoid being swept along in the hysteria of BBC's The Traitors . Having finally relented, I am now, predictably, slightly obsessed with the show that manages to turn a group of broadly respectable and intelligent participants into a rabble-rousing band of thirteenth-century peasants, accusing each other of witchcraft at the smallest provocation. Still, if I had to choose any human being in the world to deliver me bad news, it would be Claudia Winkle