I found the Nominet call incredibly informative and certainly worth the 46 minutes of your time to watch the AC chat link George provided for anyone interested in seeing how their dispute procedure works in practice.

Out of 12 million domain names 1 or 2 cents on each domain name provides for the cost of the dispute procedure.

In their system, out of 700 disputes

~225 were resolved at free private mediation
~250 went to determination
3 went to appeal (2 agreed and 1 disagreed)

This means free private mediation is resolving is resolving over 30% of all disputes! This is an incredible statistic for resolving disputes. I and I believe several other WG members hope the co-chairs will permit time to discuss including mediation as a recommendation in the IGO/INGO CRP WG’s final report.

Hopefully this working group will also be able to see the same benefits and then the benefits can be extended to all complaints not just those initiated by IGOs.

w.r.t. to URS in particular the main concern with mediation was a 2 week delay in obviously bad domains being taken down which has to be balanced against >30% settlement rate.