There is a new guide out called Prompt Engineering for Mediators. The Singapore Mediation Centre wrote it with the Singapore Academy of Law and Microsoft. It is free. At 23 pages, it takes half an hour to read. It is one of the first practical AI guides written for mediators rather than for lawyers, and it is worth your time.
Much of the writing on AI for dispute resolution is either hype or a list of warnings. This guide is more useful than that. Its core message is simple. AI can help you prepare, think and document, but it cannot mediate. The judgment, the ethics and the presence in the room remain yours.
Six rules and one good question
The guide opens with six rules for any mediator using AI. Treat it as an aid, not a substitute for professional judgment. Never put confidential mediation material into a public AI tool. Anonymise and redact on anything that is not an enterprise platform. Verify every output before you rely on it or share it. Treat AI-generated insights as areas to explore, not conclusions. And be transparent with the parties about your use of it.
None of this is new to anyone who has thought hard about AI in practice. What helps is how concrete the guide gets. It includes a sample disclosure statement. You can adapt it for your own agreement to mediate. It sorts mediation material into five categories. These run from public court documents through to caucus information and personal data. For each one it states what you may and may not do. Private session material should not go into any AI tool at all. The only exception is a clear, audited enterprise arrangement with party consent.
It also offers a single test for the grey areas. Could you explain to both parties what went into the tool and why? Could you show how you protected their confidentiality and your impartiality? If the answer is no, or even uncertain, keep the information out.
A structure for better prompts
The heart of the guide is a four-part structure. Every prompt needs a goal, some context, your expectations and a source. State the task. Explain the situation and the role you want the tool to play. Say how you want the answer framed. Tell it what material to rely on, and only that material.
The guide then works through each stage of a mediation, with example prompts you can copy and adapt. One prompt summarises a party’s opening statement without adopting its framing. Another builds an issue list from correspondence. Others surface possible underlying interests, draft opening remarks, and reframe inflammatory language. One turns agreed points into a first draft of terms for the lawyers to review.
The example prompts are the best part of the document. Each one builds the ethical guardrails into the prompt itself. They ask for options, not recommendations. They instruct the tool to flag gaps as questions rather than fill them with assumptions. They ban any view on who is right. The guide warns against prompts that ask AI to argue for a party or to win. It suggests even-handed verbs instead: summarise, list, compare, reframe, translate. That framing discipline is a skill in its own right, and the guide teaches it well.
What to keep in mind
The guide has a strong commercial mediation flavour. The examples assume represented parties, position papers and settlement proposals. The principles carry over to family, workplace and community work. But you will need to rewrite the prompts. The guide also assumes a Singapore setting. Australian mediators should read it alongside AMDRAS and their own scheme’s confidentiality rules. Disclosure and record-keeping duties differ. Its advice on enterprise tools also assumes a licence. Many sole practitioners lack one. For them, the anonymise-and-redact discipline matters even more.
Those caveats aside, this is a generous and careful piece of work. If you take one thing from it, take this habit. Write impartiality into your prompts instead of hoping the tool supplies it. Pick one example prompt, adapt it to your own practice, and test it on anonymised material. Keep a record of what you used. The guide is free to download from the Singapore Mediation Centre. It deserves a place in your professional reading this year.