Civil Justice Reform and Mandatory Civil Mediation in Saskatchewan: Lessons from a Maturing Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the development of the civil court-connected mediation program in Saskatchewan. The program was evaluated by the authors following its first 10years of operation, using focus groups and interviews with lawyers, clients, mediators and judges across the province. The resulting data shows a broad level of satisfaction with the mediation program among clients and a growing acceptance by the Bar and the Bench. There is an interesting alignment of views between some lawyers and clients describing a desire for proactive (albeit non-evaluative) mediators. The authors go on to discuss possible program enhancements to promote greater flexibility in case referral type, timing and management and to further extend acceptance of the program. The authors conclude that the Saskatchewan program provides a good example of a "maturing" court-connected mediation program, demonstrating the importance of changes in attitudes and behaviours especially among lawyers if justice reform in the form of court-connected mediation is to have a lasting impact on the adversarial culture of the courts.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
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".