Mediation or litigation: the first choice to make

Our experience makes us point out that there is no quick fix and that the best way to avoid litigation is to manage your interests, which is not always possible, unfortunately. The lawyer cannot therefore sufficiently draw the attention of his client to the irreparable damage that a legal dispute opened against a business relationship will inevitably cause to him. From the business dispute solicitors you can now have the best options.

The trust inherent in any commercial relationship will in fact almost always be broken. Open judicial litigation must therefore be considered only as a last resort and it is important that litigants be able to understand the other avenues that modern law now offers to the parties in the settlement of their disputes, whether to prevent it, to avoid it or to regulate it, so as not to destroy definitively and necessarily all that counted between them in the past.

The first choice for any litigant wishing to venture on the road to the settlement of his civil dispute is whether it should be settled by mediation or by judicial process.

Mediation

Mediation is a particular way of resolving a civil dispute. It consists in submitting the dispute to a neutral mediator, chosen by mutual agreement of the parties, who will not have any binding power over them, but whose task will be to lead them to renew the dialogue for to express their claims to one another and to work on some out-of-court solutions to the settlement of their dispute, solutions that the parties themselves have reached after the mediation process.

Mediation is therefore distinct from conciliation, which is now the first and essarily be part of an extrajudicial framework. This framework must be defined by the parties themselves, usually with the help of the mediator. The mediator will enter his action in a horizontal relationship with the parties and not in a vertical relationship of authority to person.

Confidentiality of the exchanges held during mediation is another key element of this settlement process. All that will be said before the mediator must remain not only secret, but cannot, in any way, be reported later in the eventual judicial framework of the dispute, if the process of mediation did not come to result in a final settlement.

If mediation can take place before any attempt is made to settle the dispute, it can also intervene during the dispute. The law provides for this possibility. This law stipulates that mediation can replace conciliation. It provides that the court may at any time advise the parties to mediate.

The parties can also, by themselves, at any time decide to suspend the ongoing legal proceedings in an attempt to settle or move towards a solution through mediation. If they reach an agreement, the Code of Civil Procedure stipulates that this agreement may be ratified by the court seized, which will include the effects of a court decision that has come into force. It also guarantees confidentiality, in particular the fact that the statements of the parties cannot be taken into account in the judicial process as well as the independence of the mediation process from that of the court.