Culture Change - A Tale of Two Cities and Mandatory Court-Connected Mediation

This is the first study to ask Canadian lawyers to describe in depth what they really think about mediation and the impact it has had on their litigation practices.'3 Their responses are rich, reflective and diverse. Many different understandings of mediation goals within litigation are present in the legal profession itself, and this lack of consensus is reflected in the results of this study. Before explaining the methodology of the study, it is useful to first set out its theoretical premises and to relate these to previous research on the legal profession which offer important insights relevant to the development of mandatory court-connected mediation, and thus to the interpretation of data produced by this study. These premises are: the relationship between ideologies of legal practice and changes in the social and economic environment; the dominance of an adversarial model of lawyering; and the variables produced by so-called "local legal culture."