What, if anything, reasonably provides mediation consumers with confidence about the quality of mediators' services?The expansion and maturation of mediation as a practice has understandably (and laudably) led many to begin to focus attention on questions of quality assurance. 1 Assuring high-quality practice has been no easy undertaking for any set of practitioners. As evidence of this proposition, consider that even the professions that have been recognized for centuries (doctors and lawyers, for example) still continually modify their approaches to quality assurance. Although no practice group can claim to have "solved" the difficult question, many have been at it for far longer than mediation. So, those who care about mediation might wisely look to other practices or professions for indicators of what mechanisms are most effective.This article begins, therefore, with an exploration of how consumers derive confidence in the services of practitioners outside of mediation. Why are we confident that the doctor we have chosen will not be lousy? The lawyer? The plumber? The tattoo artist? It turns out that, regardless of the context, whatever confidence we have in the quality of these practitioners'

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