The practice of mediation can be thought of as a form of supervised negotiation in which the disputing parties work with an impartial third party to strive to reach an agreement over the terms of their dispute. When parties are able to resolve their differences through mediation, not only does it reduce the workload for the courts, but it also, in most cases, improves the mental health of the participants.
As a consequence of this, the use of mediation services in the UK offers a number of significant advantages over the more traditional approach of filing a lawsuit.
- Cost-Effective
When compared to the normal cost of a lawsuit, mediation is far more affordable. If you hire a mediator instead of a lawyer, you will spend far less money over a much shorter period of time. This is because the response time for mediation is significantly faster than it is for legal representation. Moreover, many charitable organizations provide mediation services at no cost or at a low cost for specific types of disputes.
- Preserves your connections
One of the most underrated advantages of mediation service is that it can assist in the preservation of relationships, both personal and professional, that would most certainly be destroyed through the course of several years of litigation. Relationships are often salvageable through mediation because it is a cooperative rather than a combative process and because it is not fundamentally a winning and losing thing.
- Quicker Results
In contrast to the months or even years that are generally required for the completion of a legal case, the mediation process typically only takes a few days or weeks (in some cases, it can take a month if it is a complicated issue). When parties desire to move on with their lives, mediation enables a more realistic schedule for settling a conflict. This allows everyone involved to get back to living their lives.
- Privacy Maintained
Mediation, as opposed to court proceedings, which are open to the public, is almost always held in strict confidence. This implies that neither recordings nor transcripts are kept of it, and any information that is presented during the process cannot be used or discussed at a later time. Simply for this one reason, it might be preferable to choose the route of mediation rather than filing a lawsuit.
- Increased Adaptability and Capability
The parties retain control over the situation during mediation. It indicates that the parties will have considerably more influence in the discussions, as well as a higher degree of control over the final result.
- Less Formal Setup
In contrast to a court-driven process which is undertaken according to a plethora of processes and regulations intended to isolate the parties, mediation is informal, allowing for greater participation from all parties involved. As a result, because the mediator works directly with both sides of the dispute, he or she is able to move the parties' attention away from their stated viewpoints and toward the parties' actual needs and interests.
- Better Results
For these reasons and more, parties often feel that mediation yields preferable results to litigation. Parties are often more satisfied with the results of mediation since there is no true winner or loser, there is no admission of wrongdoing or guilt, and the settlement is reached via mutual agreement.
- Easily Accessible
A local mediator is accessible to you regardless of where you make your home in the province. In the extremely unlikely occasion that they aren't, there is the option of using mediation over long distances. To comprehend the mediation process, you do not need any specialized vocabulary or prior knowledge. It is not the responsibility of a mediator to make it more difficult to have dialogues; rather, it is their job to make conversations simpler to have. The mediation process is less formal and has fewer obstacles to overcome than the court system.
- Higher levels of compliance
Last but not least, the compliance rate with mediated dispute settlements is often greater than with lawsuits. This is due to the fact that mediation achieves better results more rapidly and for a lower cost.
