Over the past two years, the Southern District of New York has enhanced its court-annexed Mediation Program with measures intended, in part, to address the many employment-related cases filed with the court. These enhancements include automatic referrals to the SDNY Mediation Program as well as pre-mediation disclosure provisions which differ from the commonly known initial disclosure requirements of Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(a)(1).
The SDNY’s embrace of mediation, as an alternative to costly and time-consuming litigation, is evident in the breadth of the court’s orders referring employment cases to the Mediation Program. The first order, issued on Jan. 3, 2011 and amended on Oct. 1, 2015, refers all counseled employment discrimination cases to court-annexed mediation.1 The second set of orders, made effective on Oct. 3, 2016, refers Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) wage and hour cases, assigned to seven SDNY judges, to court-annexed mediation.2 Of note, these automatic referral mediations are typically conducted before the parties’ initial case management conference and thus very early in any litigation.3
