William Forster Chambers wins ‘Chambers of the Year’ award at the ADR Awards Night 2021
We are extremely privileged to announce that William Forster Chambers was awarded the Chambers of the Year Award for 2021 in the Australian Disputes Centre alternative dispute resolution competition. The award was announced during a gala night event held in Sydney at the Australian Golf Club on 31 March 2022.
This competition, held annually, has been conducted for many years by the Australian Dispute Centre, which is a pre-eminent organisation that has been involved in the alternative dispute industry in Australia from its earliest beginnings.
The competition contains many award categories, this being the first time that our Chambers has entered.
Some of the points we noted in our entry were:
We have well set up mediation rooms, with video conferencing facilities that are easy to use on any platform – Zoom, Teams, Webex, etc, which are often utilised seamlessly for the practical convenience of participants.
These mediation rooms are the only special purpose mediation rooms available in the Northern Territory and are in high demand.
We have a national and international reputation, thirteen of the members of Chambers, including Visiting Counsel, being qualified and practicing mediators and one of our members, Duncan McConnel SC, with mediator and arbitration accreditation, being the current President of the NT Bar Association and a former President of the Law Council of Australia.
With the ever-growing emergence of the use of mediation in international disputes and our location in Darwin, in close proximity to South East Asian ADR hubs such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta Asia, we expect to see more and more international mediations being conducted in our Chambers or, alternatively, our members being involved in mediations, with international participants, conducted in South East Asian locations
On 7 August 2019 the Singapore Convention on Mediation was launched. The Head of William Forster Chambers (‘WFC’), Alistair Wyvill SC and two of our Chambers Visiting Counsel, William Lye OAM KC and Stephen Walsh KC, having been invited to attend the launching ceremony.
Our members are also committed to advocacy and ADR education, just one recent example being that on 7 October 2021, our Chambers hosted a panel of eminent Australian expert mediators, speaking to the topic of Australia’s accession to the Singapore Convention on Mediation, the experts on the panel being Campbell Bridge SC, Anthony Lo Surdo SC, William Lye OAM KC, Alistair Wyvill SC and Cameron Ford.
