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And, overall, three to four months were required to reach the deal.
Over time, the number of proceedings increased as well as the per-
centage of proceedings where all parties were present. But the success rate of
the latter started to decline, continuously, constantly, and stubbornly, from
59% at the beginning of 2011 to 38% at the end of 2012 (table 10) .
More than 200,000 disputes were expected to be transferred from the
courts to mediation (one million in five years). There was a “
mediation
explosion
”, or, to be precise, the
expectation
of a
“mediation explosion
”:
due to the economic crisis, many professionals, mainly lawyers, rushed to
attend courses on mediation (which only lasted 50 hours, while at least 200
hours would have been necessary). As a consequence in 2011 there were 813
mediation bodies
15
; at least 5 professionals per mediation body (in some
structure also more than 100), on the whole not less than 60/70.000 media-
tors (mainly lawyers)
16
; 60.810 proceedings. There were more mediators
than mediations.
The mediator’s fee doubles when an agreement is reached. This acts
as an incentive to the professional, who will try to ensure that the procee-
ding results in a positive solution; however, in some (if not many) cases, the
parties left the mediation just before its final session, where the deal was to
be signed.
Moreover, it is my opinion that, at the beginning of 2010, mediators
were professionals with expertise in the subject, with many years of training
behind them, and able to understand the causes of conflict and how to
manage them. Later on (also because of the economic crisis), people who
jumped on the bandwagon were arriving on the scene with pour training;
the consequences were deterioration in the quality of the mediation process
management and worse results.
As already quoted, the success rate of the proceedings, where all par-
ties were present, dropped from 59% at the beginning of 2011 to 38% at the
end of 2012. On December 12
th
, 2012, the Constitutional Court declared
the unconstitutionality of compulsory mediation; as a consequence, in 2013
there were mainly voluntary mediations, with a sharp decrease in the num-
ber and an (obvious) increase in the success rate. Compulsory mediation
was reintroduced in 2014 and the situation started to recover, thanks to the
15 Mediation bodies : 813 in 2011, 986 in 2012, 778 in 2016.
16 22,786 mediators on February 2017; Ministero della Gisutizia, Albo dei mediatori - Ministry of Justice, List of me-
diators.