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CONFLICT RESOLUTION & MEDIATION

Advisory for Multigenerational Family Enterprises

Have the conversations between siblings, shareholders, or generations stopped being productive?

Can the dispute still be resolved without rupturing the family?

THE CAUSE OF FAMILY-BUSINESS CONFLICT IS RARELY WHAT IT SEEMS

  • A dispute over dividends is often a dispute over recognition.

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  • A disagreement about strategy is frequently a disagreement about identity.

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  • The departing generation's resistance to succession is not stubbornness. It’s self-preservation. A departure timeline, for a man, or woman, whose identity is fused with the enterprise is experienced not as governance, but as a request to cease existing.

As an IMI Certified Mediator, accredited through the London School of Mediation and trained in Conflict Dynamics, and someone who has personally experienced family business conflicts, I bring both the procedural discipline, and the structural and relational understanding that family enterprise disputes demand.

Most mediators have technical competence or relational depth. But the work of family enterprise mediation requires both.

Because both parties in the room are simultaneously commercial counterparts and family members, any resolution reached must address both dimensions.

To address the conflict, reach a mutually agreeable resolution, and help construct a way forward, my guidance and mentoring style is facilitative and integrative.

  • Intergenerational succession and sibling disputes​

  • Partnership and shareholder conflicts in closely-held enterprises​​

  • Matrimonial finance, where it intersects with family business and trust structures​​

  • Trust, estate, and intergenerational wealth disputes​​

  • Business rescue​​

  • Disputes arising in distressed enterprises​​

  • Governance and constitutional disputes in family enterprises and family offices.

My specialist focus is disputes arising at the junction of family, ownership, and enterprise systems:

I mediate between siblings, generations, family members, and their professional advisors.

I PRACTICE IN SOUTH AFRICA, ACROSS SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, & INTERNATIONALLY.

I bring not only my credentials, but four generations of lived experience inside the precise circumstances that produce these types of disputes.  

There is a solution to every family enterprise dispute. I am here to help you find it.

– TREVOR DICKINSON

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