Latreille (2007) finds that conciliation in the UK employment tribunal increases both the probability that an employer makes a settlement offer and the likelihood that an employee accepts the offer, possibly by helping parties to tone down their expectations about the outcomes of a tribunal ruling. A key question when examining the efficiency of pre-trial conciliation is whether cases resolved in conciliation are those that would have been settled out-of-court anyway. Almost uniformly high settlement rates across OECD economies, along with a lack of correlation between the existence of pre-trial mediation and conciliation rates, suggest that formal conciliation may play only a minor role in promoting settlement.