From Litigation to Mediation: Using Advocacy Skills for Success in Mandatory or Court-Connected Mediation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The pursuit of civil process reform has inspired many changes in Canadian legal systems, with access to justice being a common theme. The adoption of court-connected mediation programs is among the most significant recent developments, especially when viewed from the perspective of the legal advocate. While any change to the process of requires adjustments by lawyers, court-connected mediation, and mandatory mediation in particular, have had an unprecedented impact the rituals of practice. Such programs have introduced a process that is entirely new to many practitioners, with a conceptual foundation that is, at first glance, foreign to the principles of the conventional system. Court-connected mediation has, however, taken root. Saskatchewan led the way in 1994 with the first general court-connected civil mediation program in Canada. Now, at least half of the remaining provinces have developed similar programs, or are discussing such changes. Early statistics show significant settlement rates and high levels of client satisfaction. The promotion of open discussion and early resolution has only encouraged the growing pressure from clients who want to avoid the financial and emotional cost of litigation. Lawyers have begun to embrace new mediation programs their clients' behalf, learning on their feet how to advocate within them. Many have made broader adjustments to their practices, increasingly recommending voluntary mediation. Court-connected mediation programs are, without a doubt, contributing to gradual but widespread changes to the landscape. It would be an exaggeration to say that the legal community has welcomed court-connected and mandatory mediation. Pockets of resistance still thrive. Resistant lawyers, we suggest, have not been able to shift their litigation frame. They have continued to apply the strategic goals and techniques that have served them well in the process, either not recognizing them as inconsistent or self-defeating in the mediation setting, or, alternatively, dismissing mediation sessions as processes that potentially endanger their or their clients' interests. The allegiance to a mentality is not surprising, given the nature of the training lawyers have received in law school. But it is an allegiance that can blind advocates to opportunities for a non-adversarial resolution. It is an allegiance that litigators cannot afford to maintain. It is not that mediation programs are inherently out of place in a system of advocacy. They provide a forum that is well suited to address the concerns of litigants and to engage the skills of litigators. The mediation process does invite, and indeed require, advocacy of a different nature. Yet, while the advocate's role must shift, it retains the same base. The litigator must step out of the litigation frame, but having done that, can expect to draw many of the same types of skills. This paper explores the expanding role of the lawyer to mediation advocate. Part I reviews the extent to which mediation programs have been integrated into the civil court system, with some examples and discussion of results. Drawing our experience as mediators in Saskatchewan's mandatory program, we present some perceived barriers to the success of mediation sessions. Part II is a detailed practical discussion, containing suggestions to guide litigators through the transition to mediation advocacy. It offers advice in plain language and illustrates that advocacy skills in the mediation context are not out of reach for the average lawyer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".