A specific framework
A dedicated legal framework for mediation is inserted into the Code of Civil Procedure.
Litigation settles the past. Mediation can settle what comes next.
An amicable, co-operative route to resolving the disputes that arise in commercial life.
The cost of the contentious route
Companies reach for the courts or for arbitration by reflex — with a customer, a supplier, a partner. A dismissed employee and a shareholder in conflict with another take the same road.
The drawbacks are well known: judicial uncertainty, financial cost, delay. A judgment also imposes a legal answer to a past situation, finding for one party against the other. And it is worth going further: will the decision actually satisfy the interests of the party who won? That is far from certain.
What mediation offers instead
A space with room to move, and a considered framework in which the parties find their own solution — helped by a trained third party who neither imposes a solution nor proposes one.
Being outside the dispute, independent, neutral and impartial, the mediator helps the parties resume a conversation, understand one another, and set aside their stated positions in favour of their actual interests. From there they can trust each other enough to imagine the possible answers and find the one that best meets their respective needs.
Where litigation deeply and permanently alters the relationship between the parties, mediation tends to calm it, and preserves or even strengthens it where meeting the parties' needs requires as much. Even where no agreement is reached, parties who have managed to start talking again have taken a step towards one another, and can reconsider what follows.
The process is confidential and simple to set in motion, and its timetable and costs are known and controlled from the outset.
The Moroccan framework
Mediation has been steadily encouraged by the Moroccan legislature since 2007.
Law no. 95-17
The law on arbitration and conventional mediation confirms mediation's standing as an amicable mode of dispute resolution.
Law no. 38-15
The law on judicial organisation comes into force, widening the judge's power to invite parties to resolve their dispute by conciliation or conventional mediation where the law does not prohibit it.