Court-Ordered to Mediate

Many cases end up in mediation because the court ordered the parties to mediate. Generally there are two options here, either court-conducted mediation, or private mediation. The rest of this post refers to the process for both, so will be useful regardless of how you got here.

Court-ordered mediation is essentially identical in process, except that, at the conclusion of mediation, the mediator will fill out and sign forms to prove to the court that mediation occurred. If a partial or entire agreement was reached, the mediator will so report to the court.

In California, mediation is confidential, and so there is no further report aside from, mediation happened, and agreement was reached, or not. Mediation is also without prejudice, meaning that having gone to mediation doesn’t prevent you from making any further claims of any sort in your court case. The other party is also not able to introduce evidence of anything you said in mediation, which is one of the reasons mediation works so well.

If your court case is already in progress, your attorney, if you have one, may or may not be present at mediation, but most of the talking will be done by you. The mediator will still work to get to the key elements of the case, and will help the parties get closer to a mutual and realistic agreement. Mediation works best when the parties to a dispute are as honest as they can be, and the court and evidence rules in California are set up to encourage this. Our experience makes it much easier for us to work with the relevant attorneys for a court-ordered case, and can save both parties a great deal of money by finding solutions, full or partial, that would be very difficult if not impossible to find through litigation. For these reasons, and the generally affordable nature of our services, we think we’re an excellent choice for court-ordered mediation.