As a ‘thought experiment’, a graphic way to illustrate the benefits of the mediation process, you can roughly compare the cost-effectiveness of mediation with litigation by reference to the ‘Pareto Principle’/‘80:20 rule’.

The ‘Pareto Principle’ or ‘80:20 rule’ holds that 80 per cent of the output from a given situation is determined by 20 per cent of the input.

If you think of contentious probate litigation as being a ‘product’, then what is the percentage of wasted ‘manufacturing’ costs incurred in proceeding to trial, when compared to the total costs of ‘doing a deal’ in mediation, on terms of settlement that are ‘enough’, i.e. that your lay client can live with?

If parties engage in mediation early and ‘do a deal’, then they avoid the incurrence of trial preparation and trial costs. So, say the mediation process costs each party £2,500 in mediator fees plus £5,000 in solicitors’ costs, then the mediation process costs amount to £7,500 per party in total. Now, if you assume, for the sake of argument, that in a contentious probate trial, depending of course upon the issues involved, that costs incurred by each party amount to £100,000 (and the costs each party actually incurs in an estate dispute is often far in excess of

that amount), then £7,500 as a percentage of £100,000 is 7.5 per cent. Thus, avoidable ‘direct’ production costs amount to £92,500 for each party. That figure does not include the unquantifiable and irrecoverable ‘indirect’ costs of: (i) loss of time (i.e. loss of the ‘time-value’ of money); (ii) disruption to your life; and (iii) personal stress and its impact upon your family, your health and your quality of life, i.e. anxiety and chronic sleep deprivation, which can result in clinical depression. Whilst this example is arithmetically simplistic, when you compare the cost effectiveness of mediation as a process with litigation by analogy to the ‘Pareto Principle’/‘80:20 rule’, then it is self-evident that valuable time and money can be saved by entering into mediation early, instead of marching to war, which may possibly end in mutual self-destruction.

Put another way – if you think of mediation as being a ‘time planning exercise’, then, on the arithmetic above, it can generate 92.5 per cent more free/extra time in which to live a happy and healthy life, when compared with litigation, whilst at the same time saving you 92.5 per cent of the financial cost of resolving a bitter and divisive inter-family dispute. This holds for both parties in the dispute.

The Mediation process and Mediation Advocacy are discussed in detail in my new book, see: