adr-sml/docs/07-fees.md

# 07 — Fee research and recommended rate card

Authority: `AGENTS.md` §3 D8 (publish a full rate card) and **D14 — a single
published rate card, confirmed by Pouya 2026-08-26 (Q4/Q14/Q15-Q17 answered).**

**The card below is confirmed and buildable.** The research that produced it is
retained for context, but the figures are decisions now, not recommendations —
see "Set by Pouya" below. This is business pricing information, not legal or
financial advice.

Research date: 2026-08-26. All figures below are **plus HST** unless stated.

---

## The Ontario market, measured

### The regulated floor

Ontario's mandatory mediation tariff (Rule 24.1) sets the roster rate. ADR
Chambers publishes it as **$600 to $825 depending on the number of parties**,
covering *"one half hour of preparation time per party and up to three hours of
mediation."*

This is the floor of the market, and it is a floor with a signal attached:
pricing at or near it reads as roster-filler work.

### Published hourly bands

ADR Chambers, across its full roster:

| | Range |
|---|---|
| Mediators | **$150 – $750 / hour** *"depending on the experience of the mediator"* |
| Arbitrators | **$250 – $800 / hour** |

Plus, on the arbitration side: an **$800 filing fee**, a **$800 venue fee** for a
hearing room and one breakout room, and **$400** per additional room.

### Published practitioner rate cards

Four Ontario practitioners publishing real numbers:

| Practice | Half-day | Full day | Overtime | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| **Patey** — Tier 1, PI / insurance | $800 (3 h) | $1,200 (6 h) | $250 / h | Multi-party 3 h $1,200; multi-party full day $2,400; pro forma to 1.5 h $500 |
| **Patey** — Tier 2, estate / employment / civil | $1,200 (3 h) | $2,400 (6 h) | $375 / h | Pre-mediation caucus $175 flat |
| **Zuber** — video | $1,800 (3 h) | $2,800 (6 h) | $500 / h | +$500 per additional party |
| **Zuber** — in person, GTA | — | $4,000 (6 h) | $500 / h | Eastern Ontario $3,500. Prep and travel included |
| **Carroll** — Ottawa | $1,750 (incl. 1.5 h prep) | $3,000 (incl. 2 h prep) | $400 / h | Arbitration day rate $3,000 |

### What the shape of that data says

Three observations that drive the recommendation.

1. **The market is already segmented by matter type, not only by seniority.**
   Patey runs two published tiers off the same neutral. Insurance and PI work
   clears around $800–$1,200 a day; estate, employment, and civil work clears
   $2,400 for the same hours. This is the single most useful structural fact in
   the research.
2. **Prep time is a pricing lever, disclosed differently by everyone.** Carroll
   bundles named hours (1.5 h and 2 h). Zuber bundles prep *and* travel. Patey
   bundles neither and sells a caucus separately. Bundling explicitly reads as
   more confident and removes an argument later.
3. **Additional parties are always priced, never absorbed.** $300–$500 per party
   beyond two is the norm, and a four-party construction mediation is materially
   more work than a two-party one.

---

## Where this practice should sit

**Not at the floor.** Pouya's stack — JD, an operating role inside a litigation
and ADR boutique, Q.Med and Q.Arb held, and a working engineering career —
is not a junior generalist profile. Entering at roster rates would anchor him
into SABS volume work and make the commercial rate very hard to raise later.
Published rates are close to unrecoverable once set: raising them looks
opportunistic, discounting privately never becomes public knowledge.

**Not at the top either.** $4,000-a-day in-person GTA rates belong to neutrals
with twenty years of name recognition. Asking that without an independent track
record invites a comparison he loses.

**The position is the upper-middle: at or just above Patey Tier 2, just below
Zuber and Carroll.** That reads as *credentialed and serious, priced to be taken
seriously, not yet a marquee name* — which is exactly true.

---

## The confirmed rate card

**Set by Pouya on 2026-08-26 (D14). This is the card. Build `/fees/` from it.**

He declined the two-tier structure and set one rate for all mediation matters.
All figures **plus HST**.

### Mediation — all matters, one rate

| Item | Fee |
|---|---|
| Half day — up to 3 hours of session. Fee includes up to 2 hours of preparation | **$2,000** |
| Full day — up to 6 hours of session. Fee includes up to 3 hours of preparation | **$4,000** |
| Each party beyond two | **$500** |
| Overtime, per hour | **$500** |

⚠️ **THE TWO ROWS ABOVE WERE AMBIGUOUS UNTIL 2026-08-31, AND THE AMBIGUITY WAS
IN THIS DOCUMENT RATHER THAN IN ANY COPY — Q58, ruled by Pouya.** They read
*"Half day — up to 3.5 h, including 2 h preparation"* and *"Full day — up to
7 h, including 3 h preparation"*. Read literally that makes 3.5 the **whole
billed envelope** and the time in the room **1.5 h**. Pouya's ruling: *"3.5 was
meant as the TOTAL time committed, of which 2 is preparation — leaving 1.5 hours
in the room… The intended reading is the market's, and my wording obscured
it."*

**What found it was arithmetic, not reading:** 3.5 and 7 are exactly 2×, which
they would not be if preparation sat inside them, **because preparation does not
scale with session length**. Under the literal reading the room time was 1.5 h
and 4 h, which is not 2× anything.

**The corrected numbers are corroborated by this file's own research table**, one
section up — which is the reason they are 3 and 6 rather than a round guess:

- **Patey** publishes **3 h** half-day and **6 h** full-day in *both* tiers.
- **Zuber** publishes **3 h** video half-day and **6 h** full day.
- **ADR Chambers**' roster rate covers *"one half hour of preparation time per
  party **and** up to three hours of mediation"* — preparation counted
  **separately from** a three-hour session, which is the shape this card now
  has.

Pouya: *"Selling 1.5 hours of room time as a half day would be an outlier nobody
would recognise."* ⚠️ **One provenance note, because this file is the authority
on money:** he recalled Patey and Zuber as publishing *"all or part of 3 hours"*.
The extract above records their **hours** but not that phrase, so **the hours are
what this file relies on** — do not quote the phrase as theirs.

**THE PREPARATION ALLOWANCE IS CAPPED, AND MUST BE PUBLISHED AS CAPPED.**
*"Including **up to** 2 hours of preparation."* Never *"including 2 hours"*,
which reads as a flat entitlement, and never *"preparation included"*, which
sells an uncapped one. See §All parameters confirmed below.

**Consequences, applied 2026-08-31:** `FEES.mediation.*.hours` in
`src/data/site.ts` means the **session** and is corrected 3.5 → 3 and 7 → 6, and
**`/fees/` is unblocked for build step 9** on the question Q58 asked.

✅ **WHERE OVERTIME BEGINS — RULED. Q59, Pouya, 2026-08-31. IT RUNS FROM THE
SESSION CAP**: the fourth hour of a half day, the seventh of a full day. Not the
billed envelope. The two candidates were the session cap (3 h / 6 h) and the
envelope (5 h / 9 h), and this file could not choose between them — a fee term is
a fact we do not have, not an inference. A first pass at this paragraph asserted
the session cap as applied fact and `adversarial-reviewer` struck it in the same
change set that wrote it; the strike was right, and the ruling has now supplied
the value the strike was waiting for.

⚠️ **AND THE RULING'S SECOND HALF IS THE PART THAT MATTERS MOST, BECAUSE IT
ANSWERS THE ARITHMETIC ANOMALY BELOW RATHER THAN RESTATING IT.** His words:

> "a full day reserves the day; half-day overtime is subject to availability"

**The full-day fee buys the DAY, not six hours of it.** That is what a reader
doing the arithmetic in the table below is missing: `2000 + 500 × 3 = 3500`
against `4000` looks like a $500 penalty for booking properly, and it is not —
the two are different products. Half-day overtime depends on the time after the
session still being free, and on a booked day it is not.

**So the reservation sentence is published ADJACENT TO THE OVERTIME ROW on
`/fees/`, not in a footnote**, and it is rendered from
`FEES.mediation.reservation` rather than retyped. Structurally the same rule as
`PROCESS_FRAMING` beside the five timings under Q43: a reader who takes the
number and skips the framing has read a different offer.

⚠️ **THE ANOMALY IS NOT CLOSED BY THIS.** The gap is still in D14's own figures —
the half-to-full step is $2,000 and three hours of overtime is $1,500 — and the
reservation point explains what the gap buys without removing it. It stays on
**§12 R5**'s 12-month review, and §Recorded dissent below carries the table for
that review to test against.

**And the reason it cannot be quietly chosen is that the choice is visible in the
arithmetic.** Take the trigger as the session cap. The half-day route costs
`2000 + 500 × max(0, n − 3)`; the full-day route is **flat $4,000 until hour 6**
and `4000 + 500 × (n − 6)` after it:

| Session run to | Book a half day + overtime | Book a full day | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 h | **$2,000** | **$4,000** | **$2,000** |
| 4 h | $2,000 + 1 × $500 = **$2,500** | **$4,000** | **$1,500** |
| 5 h | $2,000 + 2 × $500 = **$3,000** | **$4,000** | **$1,000** |
| 6 h | $2,000 + 3 × $500 = **$3,500** | **$4,000** | **$500** |
| 7 h | $2,000 + 4 × $500 = **$4,000** | $4,000 + 1 × $500 = **$4,500** | **$500** |

**Booking a half day and paying overtime is cheaper at every length — by $2,000
at three hours, narrowing to $500 from six hours on — and the full-day rate is
never the cheaper choice.** The gap is in D14's figures rather than in the
trigger: the half-to-full step is $2,000 and three hours of overtime is $1,500.

⚠️ **A FIRST PASS AT THIS PARAGRAPH GOT THE ARITHMETIC WRONG, AND WRONG IN THE
DIRECTION THAT MATTERED.** It generalised the full-day route as `500n + 1000` for
all `n ≥ 3`, which is **only valid from hour 6** — the route is flat until then —
and concluded *"$500 cheaper at every length"*. The real spread is **up to four
times larger and is largest at three to five hours, which is the band a half-day
booking actually overruns into.** The document's own table contradicted the
formula three lines above it. Found by `adversarial-reviewer` on round 2, in the
change set that wrote it. *A measurement is a claim about your instrument, and a
formula is an instrument.*

**Moving the trigger out to the 5 h / 9 h billed envelope does not fix it and is
not uniformly better either** — the gap stays at $2,000 through five hours and is
$1,500 at six, worse than the session-cap trigger there, but it closes to **zero**
from nine hours on, where the session-cap trigger holds a permanent $500. So the
two triggers trade one band against another and neither removes the anomaly. **It
was never a defect this file could fix by picking a trigger** — which is why the
trigger went to Pouya and the step went to R5.

**Both halves came back. He ruled the session cap AND supplied the reservation
point**, which is the answer the arithmetic alone cannot give: the table compares
prices for two things that are not the same product. Read the table as a price
comparison and the full-day rate looks strictly worse; read it knowing a full day
reserves the day and half-day overtime is subject to availability, and the
$2,000-to-$500 spread is the price of certainty rather than a mistake. The
anomaly stays on R5 because the *size* of that spread is still a judgement about
D14's figures, and it is largest at three to five hours — the band a half-day
booking actually overruns into.

### Arbitration

Sole, party-appointed and co-arbitration appointments **in commercial matters**
are all accepted now — `AGENTS.md` §4 Offerings carries a row for each
`[verified 2026-08-26 — Pouya]`. *("in commercial matters" added 2026-08-28: the
line was unscoped, and every §4 arbitration row is scoped commercial with family
arbitration separately NOT OFFERED — Q39's struck universal.)*
*(This line previously read "sole appointments follow the Q.Arb designation",
which understated the offering, and carried a caveat against a since-closed
Q36.)*

⚠️ **`/fees/` HAS NO CREDENTIALING DISCLOSURE TO MAKE (amended 2026-08-29).**
This paragraph required that whatever the page says about arbitration *"must
state the Q.Arb stage plainly alongside it — §4 Offerings, 'neither half may be
dropped'"*. **Q.Arb is held and that condition is dissolved.** `/fees/` is
unbuilt (step 9), so this is the one place the amendment lands before the page
exists rather than after — do not build the page against the struck form. `03-content-spec.md`'s
model sentence is now the scope half only — the stage half was struck with the
paragraph this one used to point at.

| Item | Fee |
|---|---|
| Hourly | **$500** |
| Hearing day | **$4,000** |
| Documents-only / expedited, flat — simple | **$6,500** |
| Documents-only / expedited, flat — complex | **$9,500** |

**No tribunal-secretary rate.** Removed by Pouya. Do not reinstate it, and do not
offer tribunal-secretary work on the site.

### Other services — hourly

Early neutral evaluation, dispute-system design, and pre-dispute technical
advisory: **$500 / hour**.

> ✅ **PUBLISHABLE — Q46(a) closed 2026-08-28.** All three §4 Offerings rows
> read PUBLISHABLE on Pouya's second ruling, so the line item may go on
> `/fees/`. **Read the §4 ENE row first:** gate 1 is closed as **`[Pouya's
> stated basis 2026-08-28]`**, not `[verified]` — there is still no source in
> `docs/reference/` — and the framing constraints in `docs/01` §`/practice/`
> travel with the offering onto this page. In particular, **ENE is priced as an
> assessment delivered to both parties**, and nothing on `/fees/` may read as a
> rate for advising one of them.

**THREE services, not four. `settlement counsel` is struck and must not be
priced** — `AGENTS.md` Q42, Pouya 2026-08-27, correcting his own entry in
`docs/01`:

> "Settlement counsel acts **FOR a party** in negotiation. That is a partisan
> role, and putting it on a site that (a) sells neutrality and (b) asserts no
> licensure under D13 is **wrong twice over**: it undercuts the brand's central
> claim and it edges into acting for a client."

A struck row exists in §4 Offerings so the decision is findable. Same treatment
as the tribunal-secretary rate above, and for a related reason: a rate on a fee
page is an offer.

### Cancellation — adopted as recommended

| When | Fee |
|---|---|
| More than 30 days before | No fee. Disbursements only |
| 15 – 30 days before | 50% of the booked fee |
| Fewer than 15 days before | 100% of the booked fee |
| Rescheduled with a new date fixed at the same time | No charge |
| Reserved time filled by another matter of equal or greater value | Waived |

### Terms to state on the page

- All fees plus HST.
- Shared equally between the parties unless they agree otherwise in writing.
- Payable on rendering; interest on overdue accounts at 5% per annum.
- **Video and in-person at the same rate.** Do not discount remote sessions —
  the preparation is identical, and discounting teaches the market that the
  session is the product.
- Travel outside the GTA billed separately or bundled at a stated day rate.

### All parameters confirmed

Q15, Q16, and Q17 were closed on 2026-08-26. **Preparation time is bundled and
must be stated on the page, IN HOURS AND AS A CAP** — "including **up to** 2
hours of preparation", "including **up to** 3 hours of preparation". Do not
quietly fold it into the session figure, and do not drop the "up to": the
allowance is capped, so the unqualified form sells an uncapped one. At these
rates, saying preparation is included is the selling point, not a footnote.

*(The "up to" was added 2026-08-31 with Q58's ruling. This paragraph previously
prescribed the flat form, and `/for-parties/` shipped it — the one page written
for a reader with no counsel to catch it.)*

---

## Recorded dissent — for the 12-month review (R5)

Claude recommended a two-tier card; Pouya set a single rate. The reasoning is
recorded here so the 12-month review has something to test against, not to
re-open a settled decision.

**Where the single rate lands relative to the measured market:**

| Segment | Published market, full day | This card |
|---|---|---|
| Insurance / SABS / LAT | ~$1,200 – $2,400 | **$4,000** |
| Commercial / civil / estate | ~$2,400 – $3,000 | **$4,000** |
| Established GTA in person | ~$3,500 – $4,000 | **$4,000** |

$4,000 is at the ceiling of the published Ontario market — level with Zuber's
in-person GTA rate, and roughly **three times** the going rate for the insurance
and SABS segment.

**The consequence worth watching.** The strategy brief (§IV.7) identifies
accident-benefits and LAT mediation as the highest realistic near-term volume,
flowing directly from the firm's existing practice. At $4,000 a day that segment
is priced out. This is a coherent choice — a premium specialist position that
forgoes volume — **provided the volume was not being counted on.** If early
appointment flow is slower than expected, the SABS tier is the first place to
look, and reintroducing a second tier is a cleaner fix than cutting the headline
rate.

**What makes the rate defensible.** $4,000 for a neutral who reads the contract,
the code, and the System Impact Assessment is a fair price. $4,000 for a
generalist is not. The rate and `/practice/technology/` are load-bearing for each
other, which is an argument for shipping them in the same release — and for the
Insights section carrying real technical depth rather than process explainers
alone.

**One thing the single rate gets right.** Published rates are close to
unrecoverable, and it is far easier to add a lower tier later than to raise a
headline rate. Setting the ceiling first and discounting privately preserves
more optionality than the reverse.

**And a fourth item, added 2026-08-31: the half-day-plus-overtime route is
strictly cheaper than the full-day rate, at every session length.** This is the
one item in this section that is arithmetic rather than judgement, so it is the
one the review can settle without new market data.

| Session run to | Half day + overtime | Full day | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 h | $2,000 | $4,000 | **$2,000** |
| 4 h | $2,500 | $4,000 | **$1,500** |
| 5 h | $3,000 | $4,000 | **$1,000** |
| 6 h | $3,500 | $4,000 | **$500** |
| 7 h | $4,000 | $4,500 | **$500** |

*(Session-cap trigger; the trigger itself is `AGENTS.md` **Q59**, ruled and
closed 2026-08-31 — this line said "open" for a day after line 144 of this same
file recorded the ruling.)* The
cause is the relationship between two of D14's own numbers rather than anything
about the trigger: **the half-to-full step is $2,000 and three hours of overtime
is $1,500.** Any trigger leaves a gap; the envelope trigger closes it only from
nine hours on.

**What the review has to decide is whether that is a choice.** It is defensible
as one — a full-day booking buys certainty and a reserved diary, and a client who
knows they need six hours may prefer to pay $500 for not having to watch the
clock. It is also exactly the kind of thing counsel comparing published cards
finds in under a minute, and this practice's whole pricing argument is that the
card is published in full and means what it says. **The lever, if it is not a
choice:** either raise the overtime rate so the routes converge, or narrow the
half-to-full step. Both are rate moves, which is why they belong here and not in
a footnote to the card.

---

## Sources

- [ADR Chambers — Mediation Fees](https://adrchambers.com/mediation/fees/)
- [ADR Chambers — Roster Rate / Mandatory Mediations](https://adrchambers.com/roster-rate-mediation/)
- [ADR Chambers — Arbitration Fees](https://adrchambers.com/arbitration/fees/)
- [Patey Mediations — Rates & Cancellation](https://pateymediations.com/rates/)
- [Zuber Mediation — Fees](https://www.zubermediation.com/fees.html)
- [Carroll Mediation — Rates & Cancellation](https://www.carrollmediation.ca/?page_id=16)
- [O. Reg. 451/98 — Mediators' Fees (Rule 24.1)](https://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/regu/o-reg-451-98/latest/o-reg-451-98.html)