Ocampo, Lorenzo Angelo A.

ADR
2-D Reaction Paper

Court Annexed Mediation: Summing up the Past and Charting the Future; Carolyn
Mercado and Damcelle Torres

In Court-Annexed Mediation, the parties to a pending case are directed by the court to
submit their dispute to a neutral third party, which is the mediator, who works with them
to try and make solutions to settle their controversy. The mediator acts as a facilitator for
the parties to try to arrive at a settlement, which will be the basis of the court to render a
judgment concerning the dispute.
In this article, a brief history was discussed which highlighted the creation of the Philippine
Mediation Center and the implementation of the guidelines in mediation processes and
its procedures. This shows how the Supreme Court fully supports and encourages the
use of Alternative Dispute Resolution Systems instead of going for a full blown litigious
trial.
This article also features the success rate of the efforts at promoting the
institutionalization of the Court-Annexed Mediation, which placed the success rate at 71%
from the years 2002-2007, which was decreased to 62% in 2006. This shows that the
Court-Annexed Mediation really provides a substantial contribution for the speedy
disposition and resolution of cases or disputes and the decloging of court dockets. This
success rate can still be improved if lawyers could encourage and promote this Alternative
Dispute Resolution to their clients instead of encouraging full litigious trial instead, which
is honestly the sad reality because some lawyers would tend to favor or prefer a full blown
litigious trial instead of a mediation in order for them to collect their attorney’s fees as it is
a source of their income.
The future of Court-Annexed Mediation cannot be predicted with a degree of certainty
since the effectiveness of this Court-Annexed Mediation depends on how it is being used
and implemented. Since lawyers are trained in an adversarial nature, it contradicts the
use and purpose of Court-Annexed Mediation as the Alternative Dispute Resolution,
which affects the success rate of the settlement of disputes through this process. Maybe
someday if lawyers would soon gain some benefits which are more or less equal to what
they receive in the conduct of trial, they would really encourage and promote the use of
Court-Annexed Mediation as a form of settling disputes because we also have to
understand the position of some of these lawyers who refuse to use this process for their
clients since they depend on the conduct of trial as their source of livelihood.