Legal protection insurance: what about mediation?

Abstract

Mediation as a form of alternative dispute resolution, which has long been disregarded as such, is currently experiencing a significant growth. The main advantage of mediation is to reduce the court’s workload as well as the cost and duration of judicial proceedings. However, it is not until very recently that mediation has become an integral part of X legal protection insurance company’s services. Unlike lawyers who are not required to understand the roots of a conflict and the emotions arising for it in order to handle a legal matter, mediators specifically focus on the emotional aspects of said conflict to assist the parties involved in the process to constructively collaborate towards finding a solution. Such process guarantees a lasting, timely and affordable outcome. The challenge is to convince the legal protection insurance company as well as the other actors of the judicial system of the merits of the proposed process. Confidentiality, which is a key principle in mediation, implies that the legal practice is clearly dissociated from the mediation process. This explains why legal protection insurance companies have increasingly outsourced mediation processes to financially independant mediation firms. This Cortica journal Club asks the question: "Legal protection insurance: what place for mediation?" and tries to answer it