The article explores the use of mediation in custody and civil disputes in court practice in the Czech Republic. The option for a court to order mediation in a dispute was enabled by the Mediation Act of 2012, with the proclaimed benefit of shortening the length of the dispute. We put these claims to test using data provided by the Ministry of Justice of the Czech Republic based on the so-called statistical sheets of district and regional courts. The dataset covers over 2 million custody and civil disputes resolved between 2013 and 2018. Descriptive analysis reveals that the courts’ use of mediation is still sporadic and regionally clustered. Regression analyses show that, contrary to the expectations, the custody (civil) disputes with mandated mediation were on average 3 (2.5) times longer than their counterparts without mediation, after accounting for several control variables. This effect varies over time and with the dispute’s subject matter.

本文探讨了在捷克共和国的法庭实践中使用调解和民事纠纷。2012 年的《调解法》启用了法院在争议中下令进行调解的选项，其宣称的好处是缩短了争议的时间。我们使用捷克共和国司法部根据所谓的地区和地区法院统计表提供的数据对这些主张进行了测试。该数据集涵盖了 2013 年至 2018 年间解决的超过 200 万起监护权和民事纠纷。描述性分析表明，法院对调解的使用仍然是零星的，并且是区域性的。回归分析表明，与预期相反，强制调解的监护（民事）纠纷平均比未调解的监护（民事）纠纷长 3 (2.5) 倍，在考虑了几个控制变量之后。这种影响会随着时间和争议的主题而变化。