Linda Heng

In a field dominated by lawyers, Linda brings something different: a multidisciplinary perspective shaped by business, communications, and twenty years of resolving disputes where the commercial and the personal are inseparable.

Linda discovered mediation in 2004 at the Harvard Program on Negotiation, and it changed the trajectory of her career. At a time when Singapore's mediation landscape was still emerging, she was among the earliest non-lawyer mediators to enter the field, and one of the few to build a sustained, two-decade career in it.

Her path was unconventional. With a business degree from NUS and a Masters in Mass Communication from NTU, she brought a different lens to dispute resolution, one grounded in understanding how people communicate, how organisations function, and how trust breaks down. This multidisciplinary foundation became her greatest asset.

Over 20 years at the Singapore Mediation Centre, she handled complex commercial disputes across sectors: shareholder conflicts, intellectual property, healthcare, employment, and construction. She trained hundreds of mediators, assessed accreditation candidates across providers including the State Courts, TADM, and FIDReC, and helped shape the standards of the profession. She was recognised with multiple appreciation awards and the State Courts Outstanding Volunteer Award.

But the cases that stayed with her were the relational ones. The co-founders who built something together and were now at an impasse over the company's direction. The family business where succession planning had become a proxy war. The workplace team where unaddressed tensions had hardened into structural dysfunction. These are the disputes she now focuses on, not because they are easier (they are harder), but because they are where understanding the psychology of impasse matters as much as understanding the substance, and where the stakes extend far beyond the immediate disagreement.