Mediation Confidentiality Trumps Malpractice . . . Barely
by Once again, the trial courts are trying to mess up mediation confidentiality by judicially creating (legislating?) exceptions to the confidentiality statutes. When faced with a public policy that competes with California's strong public policy favoring mediation confidentiality, the trial courts too often seem to tip the balance the wrong way by inventing unwritten exceptions to the law.
Luckily, in the recently-penned decision in Wimsatt v. Superior Court (Kausch) (Cal. App. No. B196903), the appellate court fixed things up...although it was clearly not happy about it.
Wimsatt involves a legal malpractice action against a prominent plaintiff's personal injury firm. In the trial court, the former client and malpractice plaintiff claimed that the law firm "breached its fiduciary duty by significantly lowering [the client's] settlement demand without his knowledge or consent."
The client claimed he first learned of this fact from the confidential mediation brief that was provided to the mediator. You can see the public policy conflict already, can't you?
In the malpractice action, the client reasonably enough wanted to obtain and introduce the smoking gun mediation brief, the one on which his entire case rested. However, as California practitioners should know by now, there is a slight problem with the plaintiff's wish: Evidence Code Sections 1115 et seq., and in particular Section 1119.
California is serious, and rightfully so, about protecting the very cornerstone of mediation -- confidentiality. Under Section 1119, no mediation communications, including mediation briefs, are admissible in court. This has been reaffirmed time and time again by the Supreme Court (go reread Foxgate and Rojas if you don't believe me).
So what happened in the Wimsatt case?
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