For most of my career, civil litigation followed a fairly predictable pattern. Smaller cases moved through the system quickly, often settling early because the cost of fighting exceeded the value of the dispute. At the other end of the spectrum, truly catastrophic personal injury claims or other high-stakes cases justified their complexity. The legal spend made sense because the exposure was enormous.

What has changed, quietly but profoundly, is the bubble in the middle.

Today, I find the most difficult cases to mediate are not the biggest or the smallest. They are the mid-range disputes, typically falling between $150,000 and $400,000, that now dominate civil dockets. These cases sit in a middle-value bubble, cases too large to be resolved cheaply or informally, but too small to comfortably absorb the cost, delay, and uncertainty of full-scale litigation.

This is not just anecdotal. The Final Policy Report^[1] of the Ontario Civil Rules Review’s Working Group explicitly recognizes that roughly half of all civil cases fall into this middle category and are structurally ill-served by the current system. That observation tracks exactly with what mediators see every day, files that grind forward not because they are legally complex, but because the system surrounding them is mismatched to their value.

Why the Middle Bubble Is So Resistant to Settlement

At first glance, these cases should be easier to resolve. After all, the numbers are not astronomical, and the issues are often familiar. In practice, however, they are uniquely resistant to settlement because uncertainty looms larger when margins are thinner.

In personal injury cases, threshold and deductible issues often dominate the analysis in this value range. A plaintiff may have a legitimate injury with real functional impact, but one that sits uncomfortably close to the statutory threshold or deductible^[2]. Defence counsel, in turn, sees enough vulnerability in causation or impairment evidence to justify holding firm. When the top end of the claim is only a few hundred thousand dollars, even modest risk discounts have outsized consequences. A $50,000 swing can represent the difference between perceived success and failure for both sides.

Liability disputes amplify the problem. Contributory negligence, credibility challenges, and competing accident narratives become harder to price when the potential upside is limited. I had a recent mediation where the parties spent more time arguing about whether liability is sixty-forty or fifty-fifty than about what resolution actually looked like. The result is paralysis rather than progress.

I have seen the same dynamic appearing in employment disputes. A wrongful dismissal claim worth $200,000 may turn on mitigation, bonus entitlement, or termination clause enforceability. None of these issues are novel, but each introduces enough uncertainty to make early compromise feel premature. Employers fear overpaying. Employees fear leaving money on the table. The case lingers, accruing legal fees that quickly erode the very value being fought over.

Estate litigation presents an even starker example. Disputes over dependent support, trustee conduct, or interpretation of testamentary intent often fall squarely in the middle-value range. These cases are rarely about pure money. They are driven by emotion, history, and fractured family relationships. Yet they are litigated in a system designed for adversarial efficiency, not relational repair. The middle-value bubble in estate litigation is less about dollars and more about the mismatch between process and problem.

Commercial disputes follow the same pattern. A $300,000 contract claim can be existential for a small business but insufficient to justify protracted litigation. Clients feel trapped, unable to walk away, yet increasingly resentful of the costs required to pursue resolution.

A Structural Problem, Not a Party Problem

The persistence of the middle bubble is not a failure of counsel or mediators. It is a structural issue.

Historically, Small Claims Court served as a safety valve for lower-value disputes. That valve has recently widened. As of October 1, 2025, Ontario increased the monetary jurisdiction of Small Claims Court from $35,000 to $50,000. See my blog from last summer, “The $50K Turning Point: How Small Claims Court Expansion Will Reshape Mediation” ^[3].This change will meaningfully improve access to justice for many litigants. But it also sharpens the contrast with what lies above that threshold.

Once a claim exceeds $50,000, parties are pushed into a procedural environment that was never designed for proportionality at the mid-range level. Discovery obligations, expert evidence, interlocutory motions, and trial preparation costs escalate quickly. Even when counsel act responsibly, the machinery of Superior Court litigation imposes costs that are difficult to justify against the value of the dispute.

This is precisely the problem identified by the Civil Justice Modernization Working Group, which proposed a Summary Track for cases up to $500,000. I addressed that proposal directly in an earlier Substack piece on the Summary Track^[4], noting how closely it aligns with the reality mediators see in practice. The Working Group’s insight is simple but powerful, that a system that treats $200,000 cases like $2 million cases will inevitably fail the people inside it.

Until structural reform catches up, the middle-value bubble will persist.

What Mediation Looks Like Inside the Bubble

Mediation in this space requires a different mindset. Traditional positional bargaining often fails because neither side feels secure enough to move. The mediator’s role becomes less about splitting the difference and more about reducing uncertainty to a tolerable level. An experienced, evaluative mediator can fill that role for the parties.

In middle-value cases, parties are rarely waiting for a dramatic breakthrough. They are waiting for permission to accept risk, to acknowledge weakness, and to let go of the idea that a perfect outcome is achievable. This is particularly true where legal costs are approaching the disputed amount itself.

Effective mediation in this context focuses on realism rather than optimism. It asks hard questions about net recovery, time horizons, and emotional toll. It reframes settlement not as surrender, but as a rational response to structural constraints. In estate and employment cases especially, mediation becomes a space where parties can step outside rigid legal narratives and confront the practical consequences of continued conflict.

The Bubble Is the System’s Stress Test

The middle-value bubble is not a temporary phenomenon. It is the clearest stress test of Ontario’s civil justice system. Catastrophic cases will always justify complexity. Small cases will always benefit from simplified processes. But the middle is where the system either proves its adaptability or exposes its limitations.

Until and even after reforms like the Summary Track are fully implemented, mediation will remain the most effective pressure-release mechanism available. But mediators cannot solve a structural problem alone. The bubble exists because the system has not yet recalibrated itself to the reality that most disputes live in the middle bubble, not at the extremes.

If access to justice is to mean anything beyond rhetoric, it is this middle-value bubble that must be addressed. These cases are not marginal. They are the norm in our mediation practice. And how we resolve them will define the future of civil dispute resolution in Ontario.