How to Choose a Dispute Resolution Partner: Inside Shiv Martin's Credentials and Expert Panel
Updated: 3 days ago
Shiv Martin Consulting is led by Shiv Martin, a nationally accredited mediator, practising lawyer, conciliator, certified trainer and facilitator based in Brisbane with 15+ years of dispute resolution practice. A multidisciplinary expert panel supports multi-site and multi-jurisdiction programs, while Shiv remains the named practitioner scoping, designing and delivering every engagement personally.
When you commission a mediator, a named facilitator, or an in-house training program for a complaints team, you rarely get to sit in the room before you sign the engagement letter.
You are buying trust in advance of the conversation. That is precisely why credentials matter more here than in most procurement categories: the wrong process, run by the wrong person, does not just fail to help. It can entrench the very dispute you engaged someone to resolve.
This article is written for the people who carry that decision: heads of HR and complaints, L&D leads, and directors in government and regulated sectors who need to know, before a confidential conversation ever starts, who is actually doing the work, what they are accredited to do, and who backs them up when a program spans multiple sites or disciplines.
It sets out Shiv Martin's practitioner profile, how the multidisciplinary panel operates, and a reusable checklist for evaluating any dispute resolution provider, not just this one.
Key takeaways
Shiv Martin holds concurrent standing as a nationally accredited mediator, practising lawyer, conciliator, certified trainer and facilitator, which covers most of the process spectrum a workplace or government dispute might need.
The practice has 15+ years of dispute resolution experience, has worked with 50+ government and business organisations, and holds 50+ five-star Google reviews.
Roughly 80% of the work is with government, ombudsman offices, tribunals, regulators and commissions, which shapes how programs are designed and delivered.
Founder-led delivery means the same person scopes, designs and trains, which matters when statutory context and confidentiality are non-negotiable.
A multidisciplinary expert panel adds capacity for multi-cohort, multi-site or multi-jurisdiction programs without changing who owns the design.
Not every dispute needs mediation. Matching the process to the actual problem is itself a form of expertise, and a credential worth asking about.
Summary table: matching service to credential
Service | Underlying credential | Best suited to |
Mediation | Nationally accredited mediator (NMAS) | Disputes where both parties can negotiate their own outcome |
Conciliation | Conciliator accreditation, legal background | Matters with a regulatory or legislative framework guiding the outcome |
Facilitation | Certified facilitator | Group decisions, workshops, team reset conversations |
Conflict coaching | Practitioner experience, coaching methodology | One-on-one preparation before a difficult conversation |
Consulting and advisory | Practising lawyer, sector experience | Systemic issues: policy, process design, culture reviews |
In-house multi-day training | Certified trainer, accredited mediator | Building in-house capability across a whole team or cohort |
Why credentials matter more in conflict work than in most procurement categories
Credentials matter more here because a poorly run process does not just waste a budget line, it can make the underlying dispute worse. A mediator without genuine accreditation can breach confidentiality, mishandle power imbalances, or produce an agreement that unravels within weeks. In conflict work, the process itself is the product.
Consider a scenario that plays out in workplaces across Australia most weeks. A staff member raises a minor concern about rostering or a comment made in a meeting. No one owns it.
Weeks pass. By the time a formal complaint lands, the person is not just reacting to the original issue. They are reacting to the silence, the delay, and the perceived unfairness of being ignored.
In my experience, this pattern shows up far more often than a single dramatic incident. Conflict is not a failure. It is often a signal that something has not yet been properly understood, and small unaddressed issues rarely stay small.
This is where the Early Resolution Sequence matters: clarify the issue, understand what actually matters to the people involved, choose the right process, create structure, support the conversation, and document the next step. Skipping straight to a formal process, or skipping a process altogether, is usually what turns a manageable tension into a compliance matter. Good process creates safety, and safety is what lets people speak honestly before positions harden.
For a buyer evaluating any dispute resolution provider, the practical question is not "do they have a certificate on the wall" but "does their accreditation actually authorise the specific intervention my organisation needs, and can they explain why."
Shiv Martin's practitioner profile: what each qualification permits
Shiv Martin holds five distinct professional standings, and each one authorises a different kind of intervention. Together they cover mediation, conciliation, facilitation, legal advisory and structured training, which is unusual concentration in one named practitioner.
As a nationally accredited mediator under the National Mediator Accreditation System framework, Shiv is qualified to run confidential, structured mediations where the parties themselves negotiate the outcome. This accreditation is what allows a mediator to be named in court-referred or tribunal-referred matters, and it carries ongoing professional development and complaint-handling obligations, not a one-off certificate.
As a practising lawyer based in Brisbane, Shiv brings a working understanding of legislative frameworks, natural justice requirements and the legal exposure that sits underneath many workplace disputes. This matters most in government and regulated environments, where a resolution process has to withstand later scrutiny, an FOI request, or an appeal.
As a conciliator, Shiv works within a different structure again: one where the practitioner can offer options, guidance and, where the framework allows, a recommended outcome, rather than remaining strictly neutral on content. Conciliation and mediation get used interchangeably in casual conversation, and that is exactly the kind of confusion that should be cleared up before an engagement starts, not after.
As a certified trainer and facilitator, Shiv designs and delivers multi-day programs and group workshops. Training is a distinct skill from mediating a dispute. It requires instructional design, adult learning principles and the ability to hold a room of thirty tribunal staff for five days, not just a two-hour session with two disputing parties.
What helps is naming this plainly to any provider you are considering: ask which of these standings they personally hold, and which ones they are contracting in from elsewhere.
Why a founder-led consultancy reduces risk for government and regulated buyers
A founder-led model means the person who scopes your engagement is the same person who designs it and, in most cases, delivers it. For government, ombudsman and regulator clients, that continuity is not a nicety, it is a risk control, because it removes the handoff points where confidential context gets lost or diluted.
A federal government department once needed its tribunal-facing staff trained in mediation, inside a specific statutory context that generic external courses could not replicate. Designing and delivering a five-day accredited mediation training program in-house meant the whole cohort trained together, inside their own regulatory frame, using the legislation and case types they actually work with every day.
A generic public course could not have replicated that. That outcome depended on one person carrying the brief from the first scoping call through to the final day of delivery, without it passing through several subcontracted trainers along the way.
This matters more in government than in most sectors because roughly 80% of Shiv Martin Consulting's work sits with government, ombudsman offices, tribunals, regulators and departments. Confidentiality, statutory accuracy and consistent delivery are not optional extras in that environment, they are the baseline expectation. A founder-led model is built around meeting that baseline as a matter of course, not as a premium add-on.
The multidisciplinary expert panel: scale without diluting design
The multidisciplinary expert panel exists to add capacity, sector depth and additional specialist skill for programs that run across multiple sites, jurisdictions or cohorts, while the design and quality standard stays set by the founder. This is what lets a single accredited framework scale to hundreds of staff without becoming generic.
A clear example of this is the practice's Navigating AI in Complaints and Dispute Resolution program, built to address a genuinely new problem: complaints teams now dealing with AI-generated correspondence, questions of evidence integrity, and workload pressures that did not exist five years ago.
That program now runs both as public sessions and as tailored in-house delivery for regulators and complaints teams, which requires enough delivery capacity to run parallel cohorts without watering down the content.
A multidisciplinary panel is what makes that kind of scale possible, while a single accredited lead keeps the material consistent across every room it is delivered in.
An ombudsman office facing high volumes of emotionally charged contacts is a different kind of scale problem again: not more sites, but a need for shared language across an entire complaints team.
Delivering in-house communication and early-resolution training, built directly on that office's real case patterns, gave teams a common structure for their hardest conversations, without a single staff member leaving the building.
That is the practical value of a multidisciplinary mediation panel operating in Australia: it means depth in a specific sector, plus enough delivery capacity, without losing the thread back to one accredited design.
Stepping into a conciliator role?
Much of the difficulty in conciliation comes from role uncertainty. My recorded course, Introduction to Conciliation, explains how conciliation differs from mediation and where your role begins and ends in complaints and regulatory settings. It is $180 (including GST), with a course guide and six months of access.
Matching credential to need: mediation, facilitation, coaching, consulting and training
The right process depends on what is actually happening, not on which service is easiest to book. Mediation suits disputes where both parties retain the ability to negotiate their own outcome. Facilitation suits group decisions and team resets. Coaching suits one person preparing for a hard conversation. Consulting suits a systemic issue. Training builds capability across a whole cohort before problems arise.
This is where Process-Fit Distinctions become useful, because organisations often default to whichever process they used last time, rather than the one the situation actually calls for. Mediation is not the same tool as investigation: mediation resolves a negotiable dispute between people, investigation establishes facts about alleged misconduct.
Conflict is not the same category as misconduct, and treating one as the other usually escalates things unnecessarily. Early resolution is not the same as avoidance, quietly hoping a tension resolves itself is not a process at all.
Neutrality in mediation is not the same as fairness in conciliation, and empathy during a conversation is not the same as agreement on an outcome. Psychological safety in a room is not the same as everyone feeling comfortable, sometimes the safest conversation is the uncomfortable one.
Not every matter needs mediation. Some need coaching, some need facilitation, some need a proper investigation, and some just need a clearer management decision, delivered without delay. Delay often gets mistaken for care. In practice, it usually just means people spend longer reacting to uncertainty than to the original issue. Clarity is kind, and it is very often the fastest route to an actual resolution.
For an in-house conflict resolution training provider, this same logic applies at the design stage: a good multi-day program teaches a cohort to recognise which process a situation calls for, not just how to run one fixed script regardless of context.
Questions to ask any dispute resolution provider before you engage
Choosing a dispute resolution provider is easier with a short, direct checklist, because the difference between providers rarely shows up in a glossy capability statement. Ask these questions before any confidential scoping conversation, and expect specific, direct answers rather than general reassurance.
Which accreditations does the named practitioner personally hold, and which are current?
Who actually designs the program: the named practitioner, or a template used across every client?
Who delivers on the day, and is that the same person who scoped the engagement?
How is confidentiality handled, particularly in government or regulated settings with FOI exposure?
What happens if the matter turns out to need investigation or a management decision instead of mediation?
How does the panel or faculty get involved, and does that change the design standard?
Can they describe, in plain terms, the difference between mediation, conciliation and facilitation as they apply them?
What does follow-up look like after a multi-day training program ends?
A provider who answers these questions clearly, without hedging, is usually the safer choice. A provider who cannot separate mediation from conciliation, or investigation from conflict coaching, is a risk signal worth taking seriously.
How engagements begin: a confidential scoping conversation
Every engagement starts with a confidential conversation, not a published price list or an online booking form. That is deliberate. The right process, the right practitioner and the right program length depend entirely on what is actually happening in your organisation, and that only becomes clear once someone can describe it properly.
A scoping conversation typically covers the nature of the issue, the sector and legislative context, the number of people or cohorts involved, and whether the need is a single mediation, a facilitated session, conflict coaching for an individual, broader consulting and advisory work, or a flagship in-house multi-day training program.
From there, Shiv Martin Consulting proposes a tailored scope, drawing on the expert panel only where genuine scale or sector depth is needed.
If your organisation is weighing up whether to bring in workplace mediation, conciliation services, facilitation, conflict coaching, or a full in-house training program, the most useful next step is simply to tell us what is happening. You can start that conversation through the contact page, in confidence, before any commitment is made.
The credential that matters most isn't the one on the certificate
Most capability statements in this sector lead with a long list of faculty and panel members, because a longer list looks like more capacity. In my experience, that is the wrong signal to chase. The credential that actually reduces your risk is continuity: whether the person who understood your context in the first phone call is the same person standing in the room on day one of a five-day program.
Over 15+ years of dispute resolution practice, and across 50+ government and business organisations, the pattern has been consistent. Programs succeed or struggle based on whether the design holds together from scoping through to delivery and follow-up, not based on how many credentials appear on a cover page. The 50+ five-star Google reviews this practice has received reflect that: they cluster around specific, named engagements, not generic satisfaction scores.
The issue is rarely just "we need mediation training" or "we need a mediator." It is usually a more specific problem: a tribunal needs staff who can run confidential mediations inside their own statutory framework, or a complaints team needs shared language for contacts that have become harder and more frequent.
A multidisciplinary panel exists to add capacity and sector depth once that specific problem is understood, not to replace the judgement of the person who understood it in the first place. Calm, clear and fair beats impressive-looking, every time a program actually has to work in the room.
FAQs
1. Is Shiv Martin a nationally accredited mediator in Brisbane?
Yes. Shiv Martin is a nationally accredited mediator based in Brisbane, operating under the National Mediator Accreditation System framework, alongside standing as a practising lawyer, conciliator, certified trainer and facilitator.
2. What is a multidisciplinary mediation panel, and why does Shiv Martin Consulting use one?
A multidisciplinary mediation panel is a group of additional specialists brought in for scale, sector depth or multi-cohort training, working within a design set by the founder. It adds capacity without changing who owns the program's structure and quality standard.
3. How do I choose a dispute resolution provider for a government or enterprise team?
Ask what accreditations the named practitioner personally holds, who designs versus delivers the program, how confidentiality is handled, and whether they can explain the difference between mediation, conciliation, facilitation and investigation. Providers who answer plainly are generally lower risk.
4. Does Shiv Martin Consulting provide in-house conflict resolution training?
Yes. In-house multi-day training is the flagship offer, designed around a specific team's legislation, real case patterns and context, then delivered in the room and embedded with follow-up, rather than run as a generic external course.
5. What is the difference between mediation and conciliation?
Mediation is a structured, confidential process where a neutral mediator helps parties negotiate their own outcome. Conciliation follows a defined framework where the practitioner can offer options or guidance toward a resolution, rather than remaining strictly neutral on content.
6. Does every workplace conflict need mediation?
No. Some matters need conflict coaching, some need facilitation, some need a formal investigation, and some simply need a clearer management decision made without delay. Matching the process to the actual problem is more important than defaulting to a familiar tool.
References
Mediator Standards Board, National Mediator Accreditation System (NMAS) Practice Standards, https://msb.org.au
Queensland Law Society, Practising Certificate Requirements, https://www.qls.com.au
Fair Work Ombudsman, Resolving Workplace Disputes, https://www.fairwork.gov.au
Commonwealth Ombudsman, Approach to Handling Complaints, https://www.ombudsman.gov.au
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