Galloping to successten years ago, solicitor eileen carroll fell from a horse.

her time in recovery gave her the chance to plan a new organisation for resolving disputes.

victoria Maccallum reports

This year the Centre for Dispute Resolution (CEDR) celebrates its tenth anniversary - but were it not for a bad riding accident, it might never have got this far.It was when solicitor Eileen Carroll, CEDR's deputy chief executive, was lying in hospital recovering from a fall from a horse in 1989, that she started to consider different forms of alternative dispute resolution (ADR).

'I had spent time in the States with my firm [Turner Kennett Brown, now merged with Nabarro Nathanson] and ADR was very popular over there,' she explains.

'I wondered why no one had ever tried to establish it over here, and so when I was well again, I started seriously to research the subject.'She contacted professor Karl Mackie, an academic who had written extensively on mediation and ADR and had an 'intellectual curiosity' about the subject.

He says: 'I wanted to find out whether there was an alternative to litigation, and if there was, why it had never been applied.'With an initial fund of 12,000, raised from sympathetic law firms and businesses, the embryonic CEDR began life in 1990, operating from Ms Carroll's office at TKB.

She says: 'CEDR couldn't afford its own offices, so when we appointed Karl chief executive in 1990, he worked from one of my partner's offices.'Ten years on, the organisation has a City base, 40 full-time staff, and more than 1,000 accredited mediators on its books.

It mediated 550 cases last year, and turns over several million pounds annually.The original aim of the organisation was simple: 'I thought the legal profession was letting people down,' says Ms Carroll.

'Although I was a member of the profession, I realised it wasn't giving clients a good deal.

In the majority of cases that I dealt with, the client settled, but not until quite a late stage, when a lot of money had already been spent.

My vision was for people to settle earlier in the case, in a structured way before too much money had been spent.' Ms Carroll admits that she was a 'poacher turned gamekeeper'.Mr Mackie says gaining acceptance from the legal and business community was not easy.

'People were very sceptical - their attitude reminded me of the Swiss watchmaker who looked at a digital watch and said "Ingenious, interesting, but it'll never catch on".'However, this attitude changed thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied customers, a lot of campaigning by the CEDR team, and a little help from Lord Woolf.

'The current boom in mediation [CEDR's caseload increased by 114% last year] can almost entirely be put down to the Civil Procedure Rules reform,' says Ms Carroll.

'CPR has changed the entire mediation climate, opening lawyers' eyes to its benefits - it's made me more happy than I can say.'Mr Mackie agrees.

'CPR has consolidated and crystallised our own campaigning over the past decade - there's now a formal realisation that mediation is here to stay thanks to these reforms, which have made it a formal part of the system.' Research consistently shows that clients are often reluctant to use mediation - sometimes because their lawyers are ill-informed about it - but once they do, they are keen to use it again.Many lawyers seem to welcome the increasing use of mediation: Peter Crossley, national head of dispute resolution at Hammond Suddard Edge, which this month won the professions category in CEDR's biennial awards for development of ADR, is one vocal advocate.'Mediation is quicker than litigation, relatively cheaper, and - very importantly - can resolve disputes without damaging commercial relations,' he says.

The client may win in court, but at the expense of destroying the business relationship, he says.Terry Mehigan, a partner at arguably the City's most feared litigators - Herbert Smith - agrees, but sees mediation as a tool to be used in conjunction with rather than as an alternative to litigation.

'Mediation plays a part in bringing forward the process of settling disputes,' he says.

'However, if a case is going to go to court anyway, if there is a point that one of the parties wants made, then mediation won't change that.'The figures seem to support the legal profession's increasing acceptance of ADR - the total value of CEDR mediated claims last year was 1.2 billion, with 80% settling within a month - as does the number of similar organisations springing up, including Dispute Mediation, the Panel of Independent Mediators, the Academy of Experts and the Association of Mediation Solicitors.CEDR does not consider itself unduly threatened.

'We have a broader and deeper experience of developing high-quality ADR,' says Mr Mackie.

'We deal with all sort of disputes, from clinical negligence to construction, and we're also a non-profit making organisation - everything we make we plough back into the company.'Despite this confidence, CEDR is by no means resting on its laurels.

Future plans include pilot schemes to encourage ADR growth in areas such as personal injury and education, which have so far been slow to take it up.

'We want to explore different ways of making mediation mainstream in all areas,' explains Mr Mackie.

'We also want to encourage the business world to see mediation not as a last resort before litigation, but as a management tool.'Ms Carroll sees the international arena as a major growth area for CEDR.

'Although about 25% of our work comes from overseas anyway, we want to increase that,' she explains.

'International work is an incredible growth opportunity - we want to develop London as an international centre for mediation, just as France has the reputation for international arbitration.

We're still at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the mediation market - we've come a very long way in ten years, and the success of CEDR has surpassed all my expectations, but there's still a lot further to go in the next ten.'