Civil Justice 2007 – 2013

The Costs of Non ADR – Surveying and Showing the Actual Costs of Intra-community Commercial Litigation

Background

This is the third project awarded by ADR Center in the Framework of the EU funded “Specific Programme Civil Justice 2007- 2013.The project aims to create a survey that analyzes the cost of not using ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution, and in particular mediation) in the commercial sector. The survey is to support the validity of Intra-EU mediation, to sensitize and encourage small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in-house counsel, lawyers, and governments alike to reflect on the importance of ADR, and to inspire further action in this field. Using a survey to scrutinize and deconstruct the costs of not using ADR, i.e., both the micro-economic and the societal consequences of relying exclusively or predominantly on traditional adjudicative processes, is perhaps not an intuitive or obvious concept.By surveying companies within twenty-six Member States of the EU, we will be able to quantify how costly it is for their companies to engage in disputes that result in litigation.

The survey is to be used as a stepping stone to promote mediation and ADR through an international conference, which will be hosted in Brussels. At the conference, the results of the survey will be made widely available with the goal of further promoting mediation and ADR. The conference will create an atmosphere of shared interests as both business people and legal professionals can discuss the uses and effectiveness of ADR in their practices. The conference will also provide the opportunity for participants to enrol in a “pledge.” The goal in structuring the pledge is to ease the resistance of business people to the use of ADR. This pledge will state that the participants will always consider using ADR when confronted with a commercial dispute. We also anticipate that a by-product of the pledge is that it will draw worldwide attention to the European Commission’s considerable effort to promote ADR by widely publicizing the conference and the pledge through press releases and various websites.

Key activities:

creating a survey to quantify the cost of not using mediation. The survey will be distributed to businesses (both large and small) within the EU. The survey will be promoted through ADR Center and both partners, European Company Lawyers Association (ECLA) and European Association of Craft, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (UEAPME).
Organizing an International Conference, which will be hosted in Brussels in fall 2009 for the dissemination of the survey results. At the conference, an additional goal will be to attain a written pledge from the participants agreeing to always consider ADR when faced with a dispute.