Justice without Lawyers? Insights from Italian Mediation

Giovanni Ramello (Università del Piemonte Orientale)
Alessandro Melcarne (Unversité Paris Nanterre)
Svitlana Zadorozhna (Università di Torino)

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of advocates’ participation on mediation outcome in Italy. Based on the data from the Italian Chambers of Commerce during the period 2011-2017, we define whether advocates’ involvement increases for the parties to the mediation the probability to enter into mediation agreement. We are interested in Italian mediation because of its mandatory character for selected categories of cases and the mandatory involvement of the professional lawyer (advocate) into these cases.
The goal of this study is to estimate empirically the impact of advocates’ participation on the mediation outcome in Italy. Thus, the analysis will focus on the evaluation of explanatory variables in terms of the probability for the parties to come to the agreement and close the dispute. Findings supply evidence on the puzzling role of advocates in mediation. It demonstrates that in the case of attorneys’ presence, the outcome of mediation mainly depends on their incentivess within the process of dispute resolution. Beyond the scholarly interest, such results have also straightforward policy implications.

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