Most that enter a court system are settled before a judgement.
That fact is usually reported as evidence of efficiency and is equally evidence of cost.
Parties settle because is expensive, slow and uncertain, not because they agree.
The therefore reflects the relative capacity of each side to wait.
A company with a legal department and an individual with a mortgage do not face the same clock.
was introduced to reach agreement earlier and more cheaply, and it does both.
Evaluations report high satisfaction, high compliance with the outcome and substantially lower cost.
is the strongest finding, since a party that helped design a remedy tends to perform it.
The objections are structural rather than empirical.
A mediated is private, so it produces no and no public record of a recurring problem.
Where a single company is settling the same complaint a thousand times, the absence of a judgement is the company's asset.
Courts perform a second function beyond resolving the case in front of them.
They state what the law is, in public, in a form that the next thousand parties can rely on.
A system that mediates everything stops producing that public good while continuing to consume its reputation.
mediation raises a further question about access.
Requiring a party to attempt it before filing is efficient and delays the remedy for somebody who needs an order rather than a conversation.
Domestic violence and eviction are the cases where that delay is most often criticised.
A sensible design mediates by default and the categories where power is too unequal for a conversation to be one.