In the context of commercial litigation, conflict most often occurs between two parties who believe that they have equal bargaining power or at least some leverage to insist on some sort of right they may have. Both parties think they are fully right in some way, and are willing to enforce that belief. Enter the lawyers.
So willing that they are prepared to spend money to ensure this is the case. And so they should, where they honestly and genuinely believe so. Enter the courts.
However, costs and time slowly erode the momentum of both sides. What was once a legal dispute over a commercial issue, in time veers away from the concept of legal "right" into the space of commercial viability - a space devoid of whether some is right or not, but rather whether it is commercially sensible or not to keep insisting.
While each party stills maintains some power, decisions are still able to be made jointly towards a peaceful outcome. Enter mediation.
Post-conflict, an inevitability surely arises - there will be a winner and a loser. Unfortunately a loser can't "unlose" a situation once it is conclusively lost.
The main point is that mediation allows conflicting parties to use what power they have to make a deal while they still can... rather than lose that power completely over to the court system and the final decision of the judge.
