§ 1775.Legislative Findings and Declaration

This section opens Title 11.6 with the Legislature's own reasoning for creating a mediation program inside the civil courts. Resolving disputes in an equitable and prompt manner is a core job of the judicial branch, but a trial is often costly, slow, and hard on the people involved, while many of the same disputes can be settled in an equitable way through a less formal process. Mediation, the Legislature found, gives parties a simpler, cheaper way to reach a resolution and a bigger hand in shaping it themselves, and used early in a case, before the parties have sunk money into discovery and motion practice, it does the most good. Los Angeles County became the pilot site, with other counties free to opt in, so courts could steer suitable cases toward mediation or judicial arbitration as alternatives to trial, without taking away anyone's right to a trial if the case doesn't settle.

The section also builds in a way to check whether the idea is working. It cites an estimated cost of $3,943 per judge day to push a case of the kind described in Section 1775.3 through to judgment, and directs the Judicial Council, through the Administrative Office of the Courts, to survey how many cases the program resolves and estimate the resulting savings for the courts and for the parties. Those results feed into the report Section 1775.14 requires, and the Legislature set a benchmark for success: at least $250,000 in estimated savings to the courts, with corresponding savings to the litigants.