What is mediation?
Mediation is a voluntary process in most circumstances, where the two parties agree to sit down with a neutral person to help them work through their problem. You can always, without going to court, ask your neighbor to mediate a dispute. If the two of you can't work it out on your own, you can suggest to them, let's get a mediator, some neutral person, to help us resolve our dispute. But you're only going to have mediation if your neighbor agrees to mediation. When you go through the court process, generally these days the courts require some kind of dispute resolution procedure before they'll let you go to trial. That usually means a mediation. Sometimes it'll be a mandatory settlement conference before a judge. It may be your trial judge, it may be a different judge. They're very similar procedures. The major difference between the two is that if you're in a mandatory settlement conference before a judge, that judge has the authority of the court. He can require that you stay and issue some kind of sanctions if you refuse to cooperate properly in the mandatory settlement conference procedures. Whereas a mediator has generally little he can do if one party is being uncooperative, other than to end the mediation and send the parties home.
