SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DI DIRITTO ED ECONOMIA
Evangelia Nissioti (University of Hamburg)
Abstract
In an effort to increase mediation sessions and reduce court backlog, Greece has introduced a mandatory first meeting with a mediator for all cases of civil and commercial nature at the first court instance. In combination with that policy, the government provided future litigants with a publicly available online registry of all ministry-certified mediators. So far, around 2,500 mediators are registered online and have provided various elements of information regarding themselves. The repository allows for an upload of a curriculum vitae and a link to one’s website, aside from more mundane information such as record numbers, specialization, occupation and contact details.
Embedded in the literature of professional regulation, this paper attempts to collect all the information that professional mediators have registered online and comprise a novel dataset. The analysis following the data collection shall focus on answering a number of questions referring to the behavior of mediators when self-reporting their skills and background information; whether male and female mediators vary significantly in their reporting style, whether there is different information dissemination between experienced and non-experienced mediators and whether legal and non-legal mediators share the same level of skills. Thus, depending on the conclusions of the analysis, policy recommendations with regards to the regulatory need of new professions such as mediators will be presented and discussed.