THE TEAM
PROF THE HON ANDREW ROGERS QC
Andrew was admitted to the New South Wales Bar in 1956. In 1979 he was appointed as a Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in charge of the Commercial List and some years later was appointed the foundation Chief Judge of that court’s Commercial Division which dealt with all commercial disputes as well as matters of corporate governance.
He currently acts as an International legal consultant, specialising in the area of arbitration, meditation and dispute resolution, with his expertise spanning relevant legislation in the U.K, U.S, Asia and Europe as well as Australian Law. He has acted as Chairman, Sole Arbitrator and member of Arbitral Tribunals dealing with claims totalling more than $2 billion in various countries in the world. As well he has been sitting as a Mediator in disputes in Australia.
Professor Rogers also has extensive business and…
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academic experience, his notable current appointments including non-executive director, NSW Treasury Corporation, including membership of the Audit Committee and as a Visiting Professor, in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology.
Since 2000 he has been Probity Advisor to the Leighton Group of Companies. Since 2005 he has been Chairman of Audit Quality Review Board Limited. In the same year he was appointed Deputy Chairman of ILSAC, an organisation established by the Commonwealth Government to promote the export of Australian legal services.
In 1994 he was appointed the Foundation Chancellor of Southern Cross University and in the same year President of the Sydney University Foundation into Securities which subsequently became SIRCA Limited. He has been Patron of the Australian Corporate Lawyers Association (NSW Division) since about 1985 and of the Ted Noffs Foundation since the early 1990s.
PROFESSOR TANIA SOURDIN
Professor Sourdin is an internationally-renowned scholar, researcher and practitioner in the conflict resolution field. She is an advanced accredited mediator in Australia and has practised around the world including within the Asian Pacific area as well as the Middle East (and as a special expert adviser to the United Arab Emirates). She has worked throughout the Pacific for the IMF (and World Bank) and continues to work on assignments that are directed at developing dispute resolution capacity in domestic dispute resolution.
Tania is the Foundation Chair and Director of the Australian Centre for Justice Innovation (ACJI) at Monash University in Australia. She is also a Visiting Professor at Sydney University. She was previously the Director of the Conflict Resolution Research Centre at La Trobe University (2002 to 2008) and has led numerous evaluation and research reform projects.
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She is recognised as a leading mediator and adjudicator and has had membership for more than a decade of the Australian Appellate Tribunal that reviews lower Administrative Tribunal decisions in Australia. Her conflict resolution practice focusses on complex dispute resolution and management and deals with toxic conflict and she is an expert with the High Conflict Institute in San Diego California. Her areas of practice include executive, workplace, commercial, intergovernmental, interpersonal and complex conflict situations and she is an advanced panel mediator on a number of panels.
She wrote the National Mediator Accreditation Standards and has led national research projects and produced important recommendations for court and non-adversarial justice reform. She has conducted research into conflict resolution and disputant perceptions in eight courts and four independent conflict schemes and currently has three major evaluation projects in this area. She has particular expertise in high conflict behaviours and approaches and litigant perspectives. In 2014 she won the LEADR Practitioner Excellence Award in relation to Mediation. In 2014 she was appointed as the NBN Dispute Advisor. Her co owned business – Endispute Pty Ltd deals with dispute resolution in large scale commercial disputes.
Tania has worked across Australia, in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada, the United States, the UK, the United Arab Emirates and the Pacific. As well, Professor Sourdin is the author of books (including Alternative Dispute Resolution (Thomson Reuters) – 4th ed –2012 and the Multi Tasking Judge (Thomson Reuters 2013), articles, papers and has published and presented widely on a range of topics including commercial dispute resolution, mediation, conflict resolution, complaints management, case management, collaborative lawyering, judicial dispute resolution, high conflict disputants and organisational change.
Professor Sourdin has held a number of senior policy and advisory appointments with the Australian National Alternative Dispute Resolution Advisory Council (NADRAC) (for more than 10 years), the Standards Commission of the International Mediation Institute, was Deputy Chair of the Australian Mediator Standards Board in 2012, is a member of the Building a Civil Justice Evidence Base (Commonwealth Attorney Generals), Co Chair of the International Research Collaborative relating to Judicial Dispute Resolution and also holds other current appointments with professional bodies the Law Council of Australia, Australian Tax office Committees and charitable and pro bono organisations.
Professor Sourdin has written numerous books including Alternative Dispute Resolution (now in a 4th ed, 2012, Thomson Reuters) and is the General editor Thomsons Looseleaf Service on Alternative Dispute Resolution, She has written widely in the area of dispute resolution and has conducted evaluative empirical research in respect of nine courts and five dispute resolution schemes. She wrote the Australian National Mediator Accreditation Standards that have been in use since 2008 and more recently completed the Australian Law Council Collaborative Practice Guidelines. She has also won two Australian Research Council Research Projects in the area of Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Dispute Resolution.
She has been a keynote speaker in many international and domestic conferences with particular expertise in conflict resolution, technology, justice and mediation. ACCJSI has a number of current and past projects in the Justice innovation area and is linked to international centres. Her PhD work was used as a template to review and evaluate the justice system within Australia and her methodologies have been relied upon in civil justice review work around the world.
GARTH BROWN
Admitted as a lawyer of the Supreme Court of NSW in 1984 and of the High Court and Federal Court of Australia in 1985, Garth commenced his legal career as a litigation and commercial lawyer working in Sydney and London. Garth trained as a mediator in 1994 and is a nationally accredited commercial mediator who has dealt with a range of complex and high value disputes. Garth has also been a member of various Tribunals including the NSW Fair Trading Tribunal, Consumer Trader and Tenancy Tribunal, and has worked as in–house legal counsel for a public company.
Garth has been involved in the provision of professional mediation and conflict resolution training throughout Australia in conjunction with universities and national and state based organisations. He has worked in the United Arab Emirates providing mediation training to judges (using Arabic translators) and also to judges in Vanuatu and Tonga.
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Garth is also an experienced user of the “blended” ADR process model.
Garth was appointed as a part time member of the NSW Fair Trading Tribunal in 1999 and later the Consumer Trader and Tenancy Tribunal, and as an Arbitrator and Mediator with the NSW Workers Compensation Commission in 2002, and continues to hold a statutory appointment with the Commission as an Arbitrator.
