About Madhyastham

K. Kannan

K.Kannan is the Founder – Director of Madhyastham, a friendly outfit to popularise, train and practice mediation in a world teeming in disputes. His initiation into mediation began even he was in college, when under the stewardship of Prof Madhava Menon at the Pondicherry Law College, a Legal Aid Clinic had been set up where he took active part in legal aid related work. He helped set up a mediation centre under the aegis of Tamil Nadu District Legal Aid Authority at Kurinjipadi in 1981, a village near Cuddalore, perhaps among the first in India that resolved many a dispute among the rural milieu.

He was among the first to be trained as a mediator in a formal way in 2005 at Madras High Court, when court annexed mediation took shape. As a Judge at the Punjab and Haryana High Court, he was a member of the High Court Mediation Committee and mentored a stream of lawyers to mediation practice.  

Awarded Weinstein JAMS Fellowship in 2017, he had chances to shadow  multi-million dollars worth of commercial disputes with renowned mediators practising in California and New York. He has undergone certificate courses at the Harvard Law School and Hastings College of the Law, California University to master mediation. Even while serving as Chairman of Railway Claims Tribunal, he has mediated family and corporate disputes referred to him by the Supreme Court.  

He is an expert mediator who carries his learning in diverse fields of law to advantage in mediating different types of disputes. As an author of several books on law, including one on Principles of Insurance, he believes, training personnel in insurance industry and lawyers in the art of negotiation shall be complementary to mediation practice.