Meet our Team:
Elizabeth Ling – Principal Mediator
Lizzie has extensive experience in calmly managing emotional and stressful scenarios and can be relied on to maintain her level-head.
Lizzie is a compassionate problem-solver who believes in being “tough on the problem, gentle on the person.” She has been praised for her high levels of emotional intelligence, her ability to interpret the unspoken and navigate intense emotions as a part of the mediation process.
Lizzie is a Registered Mediator with the Civil Mediation Council, trained and accredited by the London School of Mediation. She also trains and assesses new mediators for London School of Mediation as part of their faculty. Lizzie is certified in Civil, Commercial, Workplace, and Transformational Mediation and contributes her expertise to other mediation companies working across a range of sectors including social housing and mental health.
With a career spanning three decades Lizzie has honed her expertise in mediation as a practical management tool as well as in judicial and quasi-judicial processes. She holds Judicial Office as a crime and family Magistrate, where she handles complex disputes and evidence; and is part of the East of England Warrant Panel. These demanding experiences have refined her conflict resolution skills, making her a dynamic and empathetic mediator and expert listener.
Dermot Murphy
As a registered mediator with the Civil Mediation Council, Dermot brings a balanced and pragmatic approach to conflict resolution in civil, commercial and workplace disputes.
Leveraging his background over a 30 year career in the charity sector his ability to navigate complex situations draws on his experience at a senior management level overseeing complex operational structures. He also has a particular expertise as an employer negotiating with trade unions across a range of issues.
Dermot is also a qualified coaching professional helping individuals and teams reach their full potential. He takes a problem-solving approach to challenges, ensuring practical and effective solutions.
Rachael Heenan
Rachael is the Senior Partner at Capsticks, a Top 100 Law Firm. She works regularly as a CEDR accredited mediator and her focus, as a mediator, is in resolving disputes relating to contractual issues, partnerships, workforce relationships as well as high profile and sensitive issues. Rachael is down-to-earth and friendly and the feedback she receives speaks for itself.
Chamber and Legal 500 Legal Directory rankings/Client feedback:
“Rachael is a first-class mediator. She gets on top of the issues and what matters to the parties and invests the time beforehand to give the process the best chance of success. She has a wonderfully positive and approachable manner, while also being firm and authoritative. She is committed to resolution and finding a way through where possible. I cannot recommend her highly enough. ”
“phenomenal, superstar lawyer”
“capable, bright and pragmatic” and has a “refreshing down-to-earth style.”
“proactive, responsive, incredibly flexible and available at all hours.”
Ranked in Band 1 as a Leading Lawyer, client testimonials include:
“an inspirational role model, value driven, unique sense of care and compassion”
“She has the ability to make issues real for us. She is a consummate professional.”
Rachael is a professional mediator, of the highest ranking and experience, plus an expert in employment law.
Julian Evans
Julian has been helping to resolve disputes and dysfunction in businesses for a very long time now. He loves restoring good order and peace, as well as creating renewed energy in a working relationship where this has withered. As one client put it, “Julian’s key strength is to add a bit of Castrol GTX to our business!”
Julian is an accredited mediator across three disciplines: civil and commercial, workplace and family disputes. He is also certified by the International Mediation Institute. In addition, Julian is a Chartered Manager, a Certified Principal Business Psychologist, and a well-qualified and experienced executive coach. He brings all of these disciplines together in his method of engagement with the various issues people want to be resolved.
With decades of experience in senior level leadership to draw there are very few areas of corporate life that he hasn’t had hands on experience of. This includes oversight for strategic change programmes, as well as supporting and coaching CEOs and senior leaders in SMEs and larger businesses across the UK in more than 25 different sectors.
Described by many of his clients as “a safe and useful pair of hands” Julian is seen as a great person to have on your team.
Penny Morrison
Penny has been accredited as a mediator by the London School of Mediation for Civil, Commercial and Workplace disputes. She is a natural mediator and uses her experience of complex issues, paired with deep emotional intelligence, to really tune in to the needs of the client, listening carefully to the key factors in a dispute and assisting participants to find a way forward.
Penny also practices as an employment law specialist at Osborne & Wise, previously having worked at international law firm Salans and at Excello Law. She has significant experience advising on all aspects of employment law, both contentious and non-contentious. Her areas of expertise include discrimination, unfair dismissal, whistleblowing, redundancies, employment aspects of mergers and acquisitions (due diligence, TUPE, contract negotiations), drafting employment contracts, handbooks and settlement agreements and HR support (advice on disciplinary and grievance procedures, bullying and harassment, maternity and other parental rights).
Penny advises both corporate and individual clients. She understands the importance of practical, commercial and human solutions to what can often be emotive issues. Penny has contributed to Butterworths’ Employment Law Guide, one of the principal texts for employment law practitioners and is also a member of the Employment Lawyers Association.
Elizabeth Holden
Having spent 20 years as a corporate lawyer at Slaughter and May, in 2012 Elizabeth moved into non-executive roles in listed and private companies and not-for-profits. She has held a position at the London School of Economics for a number of years and works regularly as an accredited mediator across Civil & Commercial.
Elizabeth spent many years in private practice immersed in helping clients negotiate deals and working with CEOs, boards and entrepreneurs at the very highest level. She brings both this experience and her work at the LSE, one of the most prestigious Universities globally, to her practice as a mediator. She is able to drill down into the detail of often complex disputes whilst always moving towards well-grounded commercial outcomes. Through her many years of experience as a corporate lawyer she is able speak the same language as senior executives in all sectors and she commands respect across all levels of management structures.
Alongside her work as a mediator Elizabeth also coaches and mentors senior executives at pivotal moments in their careers. Her mediation work allows her to bring together many of these experiences, to the benefit of individuals and organisations alike.
Kate Marchant
Kate is an experienced HR professional with a long career working in senior HR roles in the private sector.
Kate is also an accredited mediator and works with businesses to successfully resolve workplace conflict. Kate’s pragmatic approach to workplace mediation has seen successful resolution between work colleagues who feel entrenched in their conflict and unable to see a way out. She has a great ability to put people at ease, giving them confidence in the mediation process and the part they play in achieving resolution to their issues.
As an experienced HR Consultant, Kate supports a wide variety of businesses with their people issues. Kate’s areas of expertise is across all HR related practices and she has a specialism acting as an out-sourced HR specialist running investigations into grievance, disciplinary and other internal processes. In addition to her employee relations expertise, Kate also provides fractional HR support to businesses who have no, or minimal, in house HR support and has helped many businesses set up their HR foundations.”
In addition to her work as a mediator Kate is an Associate Member of the CIPD and CMC and works as an experienced HR Consultant. This allows her to draw on a wealth of up-to-date knowledge and expertise that she brings to her work as a mediator of workplace disputes.
Marc Reid
Marc is a highly experienced workplace mediator, trusted by organisations to help resolve even the most complex and sensitive conflicts. A strong advocate for using mediation as a core management tool, he is a Civil Mediation Council Registered mediator, accredited by CEDR, and has mediated hundreds of cases.
Marc previously set up and led a successful in-house mediation service for a FTSE-listed multinational, and for the past 15 years has run his own consultancy, Mediation4. Through this, he has supported clients across a wide range of sectors — providing both online and in-person mediation services, as well as training HR and line managers to develop their own mediation capability.
To help promote a wider understanding of mediation, Marc has authored three books on the subject. His latest, Conflict Management Tools: 30 Practical Tools to Prevent and Resolve Workplace Conflict, is widely used to support the training of new mediators.
Earlier in his career, Marc spent 25 years in senior HR, commercial and general management roles at a major FTSE oil and gas company, giving him a strong understanding of the organisational context in which workplace conflict arises. He has also contributed to his local community by volunteering with Resolve, a neighbourhood mediation charity, and currently volunteers one day a week as a Debt Advisor with Citizens Advice.
Outside of work, Marc is an enthusiastic member of his local amateur theatre group, performing everything from Shakespeare to panto.
