IMI Advisory Council
 Professor Koh |
 William K. Slate II |
 Professor Ury |
The IMI Advisory Council comprises several of the world's most prominent proponents of ADR and negotiation. The Advisory Council has a review, advisory and enabling function to help guide IMI's mission.
Members of the IMI Advisory Council
The Rt Hon Lord Woolf is Chairman of the Advisory Council. Lord Woolf was called to the Bar in 1955 and in 1974 was appointed first Treasury Counsel (Common Law). He was appointed to the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice in 1979, became Lord Justice of Appeal in 1986 and a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 1992. From 1996 until 2000 he was Master of the Rolls and from 2000 to 2005 he served as Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He was named in The Times Law 100 2009 listing the most influential lawyers in Britain.
Lord Woolf is a chartered arbitrator and has had a long standing interest in alternative dispute resolution and mediation. His report, Access to Justice, 1996 (“The Woolf Report”) was generally acknowledged to have been a catalyst for the development of ADR in England. He has also served as Special Adviser to CEDR and was Co-Chair of the Commission for Settlement in Arbitration and a member of CEDR’s Distinguished Panel of Third-Party Neutrals. The International Academy of Mediators presented Lord Woolf with a Lifetime Achievement Award at their annual conference in September 2009.
Lord Woolf has written numerous articles for legal journals and is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world. He was Pro Chancellor of London University and also holds an honorary LLD, DSc or DLit from twelve Universities including London, Oxford, Cambridge and Malaya.
To read Lord Woolf's full biography, click here
Sheikha Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa is Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Bahrain Chamber for Dispute Resolution, an independent institution established to provide a world class international ADR Centre of excellence to international and local commercial and governmental users contracting in the Gulf and beyond.
Sheikha Haya, was one of the first two women to practice law in Bahrain and is admitted to the Court of Cassation and the Constitutional Court of Bahrain. She was Vice Chair of the IBA from 1997 to 1999, is a former counsel at the Bahrain Ministry of State for Legal Affairs, and a former Vice-President of the Bahrain Bar Association.
Sheikha Haya is currently a member of the WIPO Arbitration Committee, the ICC International Court of Arbitration and of the Bahrain Supreme Council of Culture, Arts & Literature. She chairs the Consumer Advisory Group of the Bahrain Telecommunications Regulatory Authority.
The Sheikha's diplomatic career includes periods as Bahrain's Ambassador to France and as its non-resident Ambassador to Belgium, Switzerland and Spain (2002-04), Bahrain's permanent delegate to UNESCO, and President of the UN General Assembly (2006/07). Sheika Haya is the recipient of the UN Millennium Development Goals Special Award, 2007 in recognition of her work in promoting the set of global anti-poverty targets, the Path to Peace Award 2007 from the Path to Peace Foundation, and the Social Creativity Award representing appreciation for Arab women.
To read Sheikha Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa's full biography, click here
Professor Tommy Koh is currently the Ambassador-At-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Director, Institute of Policy Studies and Chairman of the National Heritage Board.
He was the Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Singapore from 1971 to 1974; Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, New York from 1968 to 1971; Ambassador to the United States of America from 1984 to 1990; President of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea from 1980 to 1982; Chairman of the Preparatory Committee and the Main Committee of the UN Conference on Environment and Development from 1990 to 1992; founding Chairman of the National Arts Council from 1991 to 1996 and Director of the Institute of Policy Studies from 1990 to February 1997. From February 1997 to October 2000, he served as the founding Executive Director of the Asia-Europe Foundation. He was also Singapore's Chief Negotiator for the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement.
Professor Koh received a First Class Honours degree in Law from the National University of Singapore, has a Masters degree in Law from Harvard University and a post-graduate Diploma in Criminology from Cambridge University. He was conferred a full professorship in 1977 and has been awarded honorary Degrees of Doctor of Law from both Yale and Monash Universities. He is the recipient of many awards and honors for his service.
To read Professor Koh's full biography, click here
Mr. William K. Slate II is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Arbitration Association. The AAA is the largest dispute resolution organization in the world. He is the former President of the Justice Research Institute; the former Director of a Congressionally mandated seminal study of Federal Courts in America; and the first-ever consultant to the senior staff of the Supreme Court of the United States on strategic planning. He conceived and founded CAMCA (The commercial Arbitration and Mediation Center for the Americas) for the resolution of private party commercial disputes under the NAFTA accords. He is a founder of the International Mediation Institute.
During the period 1994-2010 he authorized and oversaw the filing of six amicus curiae briefs by the AAA in the Supreme Court of the United States, and one amicus brief with the Swiss Arbitration Association before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He is a former chairman of the Advisory Board of the World Arbitration and Mediation Report.
He is the immediate past Chairman of the Board of the American Management Association, and he is an elected member of the American Law Institute. In 2005 Mr. Slate was elected to the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA), a prestigious body of 45 internationally acclaimed arbitrators worldwide.
Mr. Slate holds an M.B.A. degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Richmond Law School and a BA degree from Wake Forest University where he was a Poteat Scholar. He has practiced and taught law, lectured widely on law, administration and management and been published in numerous professional publications. He has been a featured speaker at many judicial, legal, and business conferences worldwide.
To read Mr. William K. Slate's full biography, click here
Professor William L. Ury co-founded Harvard's Program on Negotiation and iscurrently a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Trained as a social anthropologist, with a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard, Professor Ury has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from corporate mergers to wildcat strikes in a Kentucky coal mine to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. With former president Jimmy Carter, he co-founded the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. He is also co-founder of the e-Parliament and has taught negotiation to tens of thousands of corporate executives around the world. He helps organizations try to reach mutually profitable agreements with customers, suppliers, unions, and joint-venture partners.
He is the author of The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No & Still Get to Yes (2007) and co-author (with Roger Fisher) of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, an eight-million-copy bestseller translated into over thirty languages, in addition to other publications in the field of negotiation. His work has been widely featured in the media from The New York Times to the Financial Times and from ABC to the BBC.
To read Professor William Ury’s full biography, click here
To visit Professor William Ury's website, click here
Minister Aleš Zalar was born on 22 October 1961. He graduated in law. From 1989 to 2008 he was a judge. At the end of his career as a judge he was a Senior District Court Judge. From 1991 to 2007 he was the President of the Basic Court in Ljubljana and later the District Court in Ljubljana. He was then the EU's legal consultant for EU law with the Romanian Supreme Court and for mediation with the Croatian Ministry of Justice.
As a representative of the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the UN, the development agency USAID and the World Bank he has advised the governments of 14 European countries on judicial systems and efficiency policies, independence and responsibility in the judicial system, the fight against corruption and alternative dispute settlement.
In November 2007 he received the medal of the Slovenian Supreme Court for his outstanding work achievements, while in 2006 he was presented with a recognition by the Netherlands for the development of mediation in Slovenia and Europe. In 2004 he was named an honorary member of the Kentucky Bar Association. During his presidency, the District Court of Ljubljana received a special recognition from the Council of Europe and the European Commission for the programme aimed at clearing the court backlog with mediation and accelerated legal proceedings.
He is a founding member of the International Association for Court Administration, a member of administrative boards of the European Grouping of the Magistrates for the Mediation and, until 2008, a member of the Consultative Council of European Judges, a consultative body of the Committee of Ministers at the Council of Europe.
To read Minister Aleš Zalar's full Curriculum Vitae, click here