The legal way

As we saw, the conciliation – as well as other alternative dispute resolution procedures – is the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to settle a dispute.

Anyway, conciliation procedure might fail, as well as the parties involved might choose directly the legal way. Before starting the trial, the judge is obliged to propose, once again, the alternative dispute resolution procedure, but it’s obvious that the parties aren’t willing to accept, so the dispute will follow the legal steps, till the binding judgment.

In these cases both parties need a lawyer for being represented, incur higher expenses – including legal expenses, which are to be paid apart from the process outcome – and sped much more time in solving the dispute. Indeed, the costs of a trial are much higher than the ADR ones and rarely proportioned to the dispute value (which usually are of a modest extent).

In case of cross borders claims, the legal procedure is very hard to be carried out also because of physical, linguistic, structural and procedural barriers, besides the difficulty in identifying the law in force. The EU created a European Judicial Network in civil and commercial matters, in order to simplify the disputes handling within the EU.