They sat in separate rooms. That’s how mediation works. You never see each other. A person walks between rooms with numbers.
The company’s room had three lawyers. The person’s room had one.
The mediator’s job is not justice. The mediator’s job is a number both sides can live with. “Can you live with this?” is a different question than “is this right?” and the mediator only asks the first one.
She took the number. Not because it was right. Because she had two kids and a mortgage and couldn’t afford another six months of legal fees to find out if “right” was even available.
That’s the institutional advantage nobody talks about. They can wait. You can’t. They have a legal budget. You have a life. The longer it takes, the cheaper silence gets.