An Empirical Analysis on Critical Factors in Reaching Mediation Agreements

조정합의 성립의 결정요인에 대한 실증적 분석

I. Preface It is widely understood that the 21st century, with the development of information technology(IT) and the spread of networks, will be called a digital economy where information-driven business will be norm rather than the smokestack economy of the past. And the drastically changed world market is expected to generate even more commercial transactions across the world creating large numbers of legal disputes. Therefore, each country will attempt to develop ADR(Alternative Dispute Resolution) as an alternative to judicial proceedings in order to cope with not only the ever-increasing international commercial claims but also domestic legal disputes. Taking this reality into account, this study begins with an exploration of mediation procedure as a way of helping the court faced with its overwhelming numbers of lawsuits. And also this study makes a theoretical comparison between ADR and mediation procedure, analyzing critical factors affecting the mediation agreement. Furthermore, it is designed to find ways for disputing parties to make better use of mediation and ensure fairness to the parties involved. It tries to enhance mediators' understanding of critical factors influencing the mediation agreement and their ability to handle commercial disputes in a more efficient way. To make an empirical analysis of these factors, bibliographic research and questionnaire were used. This analysis will fill the gap between the theory and reality, and make possible the structured research on the factors. Therefore, this study sets the model by which we can evaluate how the three critical factors (parties' inclination, mediators' characteristics, institutional features) affect the parties reaching a mediation agreement. Based on this analysis, a theoretical hypothesis was built and a questionnaire was made and distributed. During the course of this work, SPSSWIN 10.0 program was applied.