Rule 3.900.Purposes of reference

Rule 3.900 opens Division 9 by drawing a line between two very different roles a private, court-appointed professional can play. Section 638 lets parties stipulate to a referee who hears evidence, decides issues, and reports back to the court — an adjudicative substitute for a judge. Mediation is something else: a facilitated, confidential negotiation with no one deciding anything. This rule keeps a court from blurring the two by using the section 638 process to hand someone a mediation assignment.

That does not shut the door on every overlap between reference and mediation. A court can still appoint a referee to run a mandatory settlement conference, since that is a different function than a full reference on the merits. And someone who served as a referee in a case is free to go on and mediate that same dispute once the reference itself is finished — the restriction is on using section 638 to create a mediation appointment in the first place, not on who can later become a mediator.