Mediation Facilitates Ongoing Relationships

Mediation facilitates ongoing relationships

Mediation is less likely to harm on-going relationships than litigation – commercial arrangements between suppliers and customers; parenting relationships between separated parents with mutual parenting responsibilities to fulfil; or working relationships between co-workers / workers and managers who have clashed in the workplace.

In mediation, disputing parties enlist the assistance of a neutral person (the mediator) to help identify issues in dispute and explore options and alternatives to reach an agreement that will accommodate their respective needs.

With litigation, however, courts review opposing versions of disputes and provide a decision based on the evidence in each side’s affidavits or stories about the dispute and what they say in court. The decision almost always endorses one view of a case and rejects the other, costs often being awarded to the successful party, thereby punishing the other.

Litigation by its very nature highlights and accentuates differences, with barristers’ cross-examinations exposing weaknesses in the other side’s version of events. Mediation on the other hand, looks for common ground and strives for agreement.

Litigation encourages a winner take all approach. Mediation looks for a win/win outcome.

Considerable damage is inevitably done to ongoing personal relationships (for example, between parents or between beneficiaries under a will) when each person, in seeking to have their version accepted, tries to destroy the other’s case. Similarly, in the commercial field, time in court is highly unlikely to engender an ongoing relationship – particularly when at the end of the day one party is the victor and the other the vanquished, left to pick up the pieces.

When a result is imposed by a court, one party may leave the courtroom happy and the other disgruntled and bitter. The trial process has most likely eroded the previous relationship even more and increased the chance that these people will struggle indefinitely to relate into the future – personally or commercially, as the case may be.

At Mediation, however, seemingly warring parties often shake hands or communicate in a genial manner at the end of the day, a copy of the signed agreement in hand as they leave. A result has been reached by consensus rather than by being imposed by a stranger.

Dignity has been maintained and the vestiges of a relationship remain intact with a chance of enrichment in the future. In the commercial arena there is every chance that the parties will continue their mutually beneficial relationship, particularly where they have found a solution which ultimately accommodates the needs of both.

Mediation involves savings, not only in material costs, but also in costs to relationships.