The eighth article in a series based on the paper “Partnership Agreement: Three Layers, Four Functions, and the Limits of Legal Formalization.” The previous one was about the three steps of enforcement. This one is about how much that road costs and what is left in hand after a win.
Three numbers instead of one
The previous article of the series, “Law Does Not Enforce Itself: Three Steps of Enforcement and Why the Court Works as a Shadow,” broke the road through court into three steps: obtain a decision, give it enforceable force, and achieve its actual enforcement. Now comes a question partners ask less often than they should: how much does this road cost?
There is no single-number answer. Below are three groups of data, and they come from different countries, years, and populations. All three concern civil and commercial disputes in general, not partnerships. They measure the price of the worst-case scenario: what happens when there is no agreement or it cannot be reached, and the dispute ends up in the machinery of the state. They do not measure the effectiveness of negotiation or of a partnership session. This needs to be said before the numbers, not after.
Court is costlier and slower than mediation
The first number comes from a study for the European Parliament, “Quantifying the Cost of Not Using Mediation” (Giuseppe De Palo, Ashley Feasley, Flavia Orecchini, 2011). The method is simple: experts in alternative dispute resolution in 26 EU countries were given the same hypothetical commercial dispute and asked what it would cost in court and what it would cost in mediation. The average across countries came to €10,449 in court against €2,497 with successful mediation. One expert per country, an estimate for a model dispute, not real cases.
The durations come from a second report by the same group for the European Parliament (2014). The length of the court route is taken from the Doing Business 2014 ranking; the length of mediation from 816 expert responses: on average across the EU, 566 days in court against 43 days with successful mediation.
The word “successful” is the key one here. Mediation does not always end in a settlement, and then the cost of court is added to its cost. How often it succeeds can be seen from the audits of the UK Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR), which survey commercial mediators: 92% of disputes settled for 2022 (328 mediators responded) and 87% for 2023–2024 (461 mediators). The sample is not random, and success is defined by the mediator. But even if a quarter is taken off these shares, the difference between court and mediation in cost and duration remains significant.
Winning is not the same as collecting
The second number is about what happens after the decision. The World Justice Project Rule of Law Index separately assesses how far judgments in civil cases are actually enforced: indicator 7.6, on a scale from 0 to 1. It is an expert assessment, not the share of judgments enforced and not the probability of recovering a debt. According to the 2024 index data, the mean across 35 OECD countries is 0.66, across 142 countries worldwide 0.51, and Ukraine scores 0.47 (unweighted means calculated from the index data for the source paper).
What matters in this number is not Ukraine’s rank. What matters is that even in prosperous countries the indicator is far from one. The gap between a judgment won and money received exists everywhere; only its width differs.
The Ukrainian numbers
The third group is national statistics, and it answers a different, coarser question. According to Opendatabot data for 2025, money was actually recovered in about a third of completed enforcement proceedings. By amount, the picture is starker: UAH 29.6 billion was recovered out of UAH 2.32 trillion in progress, that is, 1.3 kopecks per hryvnia of debt (the source itself rounds this to one and a half).
Two caveats. These are all debts in the country: child support, loans, fines, utility bills, not partnership disputes. And this is the share of proceedings, not of court judgments: one judgment can give rise to several proceedings, and some judgments never reach an enforcement officer at all. But these data show the state of affairs clearly.
Let us call this the enforcement gap: the difference between what the court awarded and what was recovered. The partner from the previous article, who obtained a decision on the value of his share, a court writ, and open proceedings, and then saw zero in the company’s accounts, stands right in this gap.
Why these numbers cannot be multiplied
The temptation is obvious: take the share of cases that reach trial, multiply it by the probability of winning and by the share recovered, and get “the chance of getting your money back through court.” This cannot be done. The three facts above come from different countries, different years, and different populations, and each answers its own question:
- the court route is costlier and slower than successful mediation;
- a judgment won is not always enforced, and not in full, even in countries with strong courts;
- in Ukraine, only a small part of debt is recovered by amount, but these are all debts, not partnership ones.
Together they give not a formula but a picture: the state’s machinery of enforcement is expensive, slow, and does not guarantee a result. This is the cost of error, if the partners did not reach agreement or reached it in a way that did not hold up in a conflict.
What sits on the other side of the scale
Against the cost of error stands the cost of reaching agreements before a conflict: the partners’ time, the facilitator’s work, and, if needed, a lawyer’s work on the layer for the case of war. This cost does not prove that agreements are “better than court.” Court and agreements are not competitors: the court is the shadow in which agreements are honored, as discussed in the previous article. The cost of agreements is the price of keeping the matter out of court, and it should be compared not with a win in court but with the three numbers above.
The same applies to the enforceable layer of the agreement. Sanctions, security, and jurisdiction are needed, but they do not shorten the road; they only raise the chances of getting through it with the desired result. They do not change the cost of the road.
What this means for partners
“We’ll go to court” has a price, and it is known before the dispute. It costs more and takes longer than working out detailed agreements, and what comes out at the end is not a judgment but whatever could be recovered.
A win in court is not money in the account. The enforcement gap exists everywhere, and in Ukraine it is wide. The “court” option should be judged by what will be recovered, not by what will be awarded.
Agreements before a conflict are not an alternative to court but a way of not ending up there. Their cost is compared with the cost of error, not with the price of victory. And on that scale it is almost always lighter.
