§ 9-17-2.Application

Not every conversation billed as “mediation” gets the privilege this chapter builds. Section 9-17-2 draws the boundary, and it does so with three independent triggers in subsection (a): a mediation qualifies if the parties are required to mediate — by statute, by a court or agency rule, or by referral from a court, agency, or arbitrator — or if the parties and mediator agree in a record that shows they expect the mediation communications to stay privileged, or if the parties use someone who holds himself or herself out as a mediator or a provider of mediation services. Any one of the three is enough; the mediation does not need to satisfy all of them.

Subsection (b) then carves out categories the chapter was never meant to reach. Labor mediation over a collective bargaining relationship stays outside the chapter entirely, though a dispute that started under a collective bargaining agreement and later lands in an administrative agency or court filing pulls back inside. A judge who mediates a case while retaining the power to rule on it does not trigger the chapter’s privilege — the two roles do not mix under this statute. And mediations run inside a primary or secondary school among students, or inside a juvenile correctional institution among its residents, fall outside the chapter as well.

Subsection (c) gives the parties a further degree of control: they can agree in advance, in a signed record, or through a record of the proceeding, that all or part of a mediation will not be privileged. Once that agreement exists, the privileges in Code Sections 9-17-3 through 9-17-5 stop applying to the mediation or the part the parties singled out. The opt-out has a limit built in — anyone who speaks in the mediation without actual notice of that agreement keeps the ordinary privilege for what that person said.