For years we've treated settlements as if they were mythical creatures: everyone talks about them, few have seen them, and almost no one believes they truly exist. In the collective legal imagination, reaching an agreement is viewed with suspicion. If there's no judgment, it seems as if "nothing happened." If there's no lawsuit, it gives the impression that someone has conceded too much. And yet, therein lies the paradox: settlements are extraordinary not because they are exceptional, but because they demand precisely what we least like to do—responsibility, listening, and a willingness to forgo procedural drama.
The mediation She's been warning us about this for some time, even if we haven't always wanted to listen. She doesn't promise miracles, declare winners, or write epic endings. What she does is something far more uncomfortable: she seats the parties face to face and forces them to take responsibility for the conflict. Without robes, without courtrooms, and, most disturbingly of all, without excuses.
The Law 1/2025, In regulating Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) mechanisms, the law doesn't reinvent the wheel. What it does is remind us—with a rather firm normative elegance—that before going to court, it's advisable to try something revolutionary: talk. Negotiate. Mediate. In short, acknowledge that the judicial process is neither the only nor always the best way to resolve a problem.
And here's the truly ironic part: we call the agreement "extraordinary" when, in reality, what should be extraordinary is going to court without having tried to resolve the conflict in any other way. The new regulations reverse the focus. They don't delegitimize the judicial process, but they do put it back where it belongs: as a last resort, not as an automatic response.
Why is it so difficult to reach an agreement? Because reaching an agreement involves losing something. Time, expectations, a part of the heroic narrative each person has constructed. In mediation, you don't win "everything," but you don't lose "everything" either. You gain control. You gain predictability. And, above all, you gain something that litigation rarely offers: a solution designed by the parties themselves, not imposed by a third party who arrives when the conflict has already run its course.
Law 1/2025 understands this and translates it into practical consequences. It introduces incentives, requirements, and procedural responsibilities for those who choose to ignore ADR mechanisms without just cause. It does not compel agreement—that would be a contradiction in itself—but it does require attempting to reach an agreement. And that difference is key.
In this context, mediation ceases to be "the nice option" and becomes a legally relevant, strategic, and, dare I say, profoundly rational tool. It is not an act of weakness. It is an exercise in legal and economic intelligence.
So yes, the agreement is extraordinary. Not because it's rare, but because it requires maturity. Because it demands abandoning the fantasy of perpetual conflict and accepting that, sometimes, the best victory is to resolve the issue and move on.
Perhaps that's why mediation is so unsettling. And perhaps that's why Law 1/2025 comes at just the right time to remind us that reaching an agreement isn't surrendering. It's simply resolving a problem.
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