Court Holds Mediation Must Be Voluntary

Without getting into too many details, our firm has several clients who get sued in multi-party construction cases for their insignificant involvement in large residential projects.  A client's entire contract may be only $10,000 or $50,000, but it gets into a case involving hundreds of hours (and many tens of thousands in fees) of mediations, special master hearings, etc.

While mediation -- the attempted resolution of a case involving the parties and a neutral facilitator, or "mediator" -- can be very valuable, it works best when it is voluntary.  Therefore, I was glad to see the Court of Appeal's decision today in Jeld-Wen v. Superior Court, holding that even in a complex case, a court cannot order the parties to mediation.