From his time on the rugby field and then as head of the Rugby Union Players Association, Tony Dempsey is used to adopting a no-nonsense approach. He tells Justin Whealing why he now thinks that approach can work in mediation.

Tony Demspey, WISDOMdr

Tony Dempsey is long acquainted with taking on the establishment. He was elected as the first head of the Rugby Union Players Association (RUPA) in 1995, after being at the centre of a tug of war between the Australian, New Zealand and South African rugby unions, and a Kerry Packer funded rebel competition that signed up Dempsey and pretty much all of the Wallabies and All Blacks of the day .

The rugby establishment eventually hung onto their stars, like John Eales and David Campese, for a hefty price, after Rupert Murdoch stepped in with over US$550 million in funding that led to the establishment of professionalism in the game and the creation of Super Rugby and Tri-Nations competitions involving South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

Now, Dempsey, along with his business partner David Vaux, whom he met when their sons played rugby together, is taking on the legal establishment, by offering a different approach to the settlement of disputes with the creation of WISDOMdr.

"We were talking about our own experiences in dispute resolution from a client perspective," Dempsey says of an initial conversation with Vaux, who started at Freehills before establishing a successful business career that included stints at Macquarie Bank and as the managing director of the DCA Group. "He felt, as I did, that there could be a more commercial approach to resolving disputes, one that had more of a problem solving emphasis, that we thought was currently lacking."

Dempsey was well known in corporate circles (given rugby union is often closely associated with big business and large law firms in Sydney and Brisbane) through his time as the president of the Rugby Union Players Association (RUPA) and decade-long playing career which saw him represent New South Wales and tour France with the Wallabies in 1993.

The model he and Vaux have established is one that involves 25 "captains of industry" who are retained by WISDOMdr and called on by the firm to settle disputes between respective parties.

Dempsey does not reveal who these "captains of industry" are, but says they are mainly retired or semi-retired senior business people in their 50's and 60's.

"We came to the conclusion that a co-conciliation model would be one that the market is interested in," he says. "We would offer parties access to a captain of industry or business leader who may have been a CEO of a large publicly listed company or a divisional head of a multi-national operation in Australia, and is now a chairman or board director at a large listed company. "They would have good problem solving skills, commercial nous and business acumen."

"There could be a more commercial approach to resolve disputes, one that had more of a problem solving emphasis, that we thought was currently lacking"

Dempsey, who was a lawyer at Clayton Utz from 1990 to 1993 and has always renewed his practicing certificate, had the confidence to establish WISDOMdr with Vaux after acting in a number of high-level negotiations and disputes while he was the president of RUPA.

He says he "cut his teeth as a negotiator" when RUPA and the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) nutted out a common law collective bargaining agreement in 1997.

"We were able to secure something that was regarded as a bit of a landmark in Australian sport at the time," he says. "The agreement dealt with minimum salaries, insurance, intellectual property and OHS issues, retirement funding schemes, employee incentive schemes and career training schemes."

Other highlights from Dempsey's time at RUPA included the development of an agent accreditation scheme, the establishment of an international rugby union players association in 2001 with David Kirk, who later went on to become the CEO of Fairfax, and what he dubs as a "massive legal stoush" with the ARU and International Rugby Board in 2003, concerning player participation agreements at that year's World Cup.

He says that with the model he has implemented at WISDOMdr, law firms would not be their competitors, but lawyers would be "people we would work with", as parties using WISDOMdr could nominate their own external legal counsel to act for them. Dempsey believes the main area of competition may instead come from senior ex-judges who currently act as mediators in many high-end corporate disputes.

"We tend to operate on a modest base retainer - with a success fee on top if we are successful in assisting the parties to resolve their disputes," he says. "It means we have skin in the game, in the sense we are aligning our interests with those of the disputing parties, because we have an interest in trying to solve it, just as they do, which is why they come to us.

"Some of the feedback we got with the current model is that many of the mediators went through a process where they knew they would receive their fee for work on the day, whether it settled or not."

At the moment, WISDOMdr only consists of Dempsey, Vaux and a personal assistant, operating out of the Sydney CBD.

However, Dempsey has plans for expansion and would like to open offices in other Australian cities, such as Perth and Brisbane, which he nominates as providing "fertile ground" for opportunities to help disputing parties in energy and resources work.

"I look at plaintiff law firms like Slater & Gordon and Maurice Blackburn, who are very proactive in class action work, and I think this could be an area where there will only be more action in the future," he says.

"Many of these disputes settle, and I would like to think we can help those parties to settle those disputes."

While a broken jaw prematurely ended Dempsey's Wallaby career on that tour to France in 1993, you get the feeling that Wisdom and Dempsey will be sticking around for quite some time as they take up the fight to the established players in Australia's mediation system.