“Courtroom showdowns make for great movie scenes, but To Kill a Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch  would be shocked to hear that the courts are only resolving a fraction of today’s legal disputes. A growing number of cases are being resolved by online tools, and sometimes lawyers and judges are not even involved. Impartial web-based systems apply computation, algorithms and cryptographic technology to bring about resolution quickly and inexpensively.

A growing stable of private sector companies are beginning to compete with the judicial system for “customers” and are also changing the face of traditional Alternate Dispute Resolution or ADR, which has typically included mediation, arbitration and other alternatives to the courts.

Not only are approaches to justice and negotiation changing, but some of these new systems like those provided by Fair Outcomes, are actually prompting lawyers and their customers to be more honest about the value of a case and their realistic objectives from the outset, providing disincentives to lie, bully and posture. Utopian though it may sound, this is actually becoming a reality. Atticus would be happy to hear that, at least!

A potential paradigm shift is in the making here, but what is motivating parties to look outside traditional courts, mediation and arbitration and flock to the web for resolving their disputes? In short, overburdened courts, lean economic times, cost, and convenience all figure into the mix…”

Great article, check it out!

“In this respect, the EDPS welcomes the fact that recital 20 of the ODR proposal states that data protection legislation applies to all of these actors. However, the legislative part of the ODR proposal should specify at least to which of the controllers data subjects should address their requests of access, rectification, blocking and erasure; and which controller would be accountable in case of specific breaches of the data protection legislation (for example, for security breaches). Data subjects should also be informed accordingly.”

“If successful, these initiatives will transform the provision of ADR and enhance consumer confidence, especially in the digital market, helping to boost cross-border e-commerce through the encouragement of trustworthy traders that are associated with ADR entities. Such traders would be favoured in an increasingly competitive internal market. However, since in practice it will be mostly traders who will choose and pay for ADR entities, there will be a risk of forum shopping. This begs the following question: would consumer ADR ensure a higher level of consumer protection or push consumers to reach settlements that disregard their legal rights? Only the effective monitoring of ADR entities by the competent national public authorities could ensure the former. Therefore, in these times of public cuts it is hoped that governments will allocate sufficient resources to prevent traders from forum shopping so that an adequate level of consumer protection can be guaranteed.

Pablo Cortés is CSET Lecturer in Civil Justice, School of Law, University of Leicester and Gould Research Fellow, School of Law, University of Stanford.”

“On November 1 2010, the Administrative Conference and the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) of the National Archives and Records Administration held a workshop to bring together experts from the public and private sector to discuss technological best practices in dealing with high-volume case loads.  Attendees included a small group of Federal agency representatives from agencies with high volume caseloads (such as disability claims, immigration review, and medical records access).

Congress has directed the Administrative Conference to help Federal agencies study mutual problems, exchange best practices, and recommend improvements to Federal administrative processes. To these ends, the Conference is looking at how agencies can employ technology to reduce unnecessary litigation and to resolve disputes more efficiently. OGIS also is focusing on dispute prevention and dispute resolution in the administration of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Participating agencies included:

• Social Security Administration
• Department of Justice
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Executive Office of the President
• Internal Revenue Service

Colin Rule, Director of Online Dispute Resolution for eBay, and Ethan Katsh, Director of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, helped to facilitate the discussion.

For additional information about the event, including presentation materials, please visit the OGIS event page.”

“VICTORIA – B.C. plans to create the first-ever tribunal in Canada that offers a full array of online tools to allow British Columbians to solve common strata and small civil claims outside of courts, Minister of Justice and Attorney General Shirley Bond announced today.

If passed, the Civil Resolution Tribunal Act will create an independent tribunal offering 24/7 online dispute resolution tools to families and small business owners as a speedy and cost-effective alternative to going to court. The tribunal would address disputes by providing parties with information that may prevent disputes from growing and resolve disputes by consent or, where necessary, by an independent tribunal hearing. Resolving a dispute through the tribunal is expected to take about 60 days, compared to 12 to 18 months for small claims court.

Giving families alternatives to seeking solutions in court is among the B.C. government’s justice reform initiatives to achieve efficiencies and deal with growing resource pressures. The February 2012 Green Paper, Modernizing British Columbia’s Justice System, identified tribunals as a simple and less expensive solution to easing delays in the court system.”

Quote from Minister of Justice and Attorney General Shirley Bond –

“Both individuals and business owners will find this a convenient and affordable way of reaching agreements. Few people want to go to court to solve a legal dispute, which can be costly, intimidating and time consuming. A tribunal offers an innovative alternative to settling a dispute in a faster, more amicable way.”

This is very exciting news!  Let’s hope other Ministries of Justice soon follow suit…

Addition: here’s more detail from the Vancouver Sun (h/t Graham)

http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/technology/story.html?id=6581436

From Ben Zielgler’s blog:

“Collaboration is good. There can be a result that flows from people working together, that surpasses the sum of their individual contributions. Such is the case with ODR: The next green giant, a paper authored by Noam Ebner (@NoamEbner on Twitter) and Colleen Getz, with background support from Susanna Jani (@DistanceProject). It’s about ODR (Online Dispute Resolution).  Its about going “green”.

ODR: The next green giant

With this paper, I think the ODR ante has just been upped. ODR is more than resolving disputes online. It’s a way of taking ownership something bigger, how we as mediators work and live.

The non-environmental benefits of ODR are well known; e.g., enhanced flexibility, access to expertise, reduced costs, time-investment and travel.
This paper also spotlights the environmental benefits of ODR:

• the most significant environmental cost of all: carbon emissions resulting from travel
• paper use is reduced to minimum and often eliminated altogether
• reduce/eliminate need for office space, and construction of office buildings – eg., courthouses
• fewer buildings has ripple effect – impact on land/wildlife, reduced electricity needs

The authors say these green benefits are too often ignored. Why? They’re “too obvious”, upset the apple card (e.g., potential clients whose politics lean the other way), disputants don’t give it much weight vis-à-vis their conflict, too much personal values (not neutral!), and for professional-cultural reasons (e.g., traditional legal profession aren’t seen as particularly enviro-conscious, with some exceptions).

The authors advocate marketing these environmental benefits, as an individual ODR service provider, as private market initiatives, and to advance the field of ODR. I’m going to run with these and “go green”. How about you?”

I think this is an excellent point, and part of why technology is taking over.  It’s faster, more efficient, and yes, more green.  I think as neutrals come to understand that they’ll be inclined to learn more.

Very interesting webinar on ODR… kudos to Shepherd and Wedderburn for putting it together!

Samuel Arbesman in The Atlantic:

“When we think about borders, we tend to think of administrative boundaries. Those demarcating lines, often grown out of rivers and mountain ranges or diplomatic quirks, govern our daily lives, and that’s doubly so if we live near a neighboring country or state.

We know that these boundaries are on some level unnatural. Driving around Kansas City, where I live, makes this abundantly clear. Gas price differences aside, it can be difficult to tell which state you’re in, Missouri or Kansas, and the small street of State Line Road does nothing to make it clearer.

But are there more organic borders, brought to life by our own actions and activities? I recently set out, along with a team from MIT and AT&T, to see if I could find an answer. Previously, members of our group had collaborated to use mobile phone call and text message records to determine how tightly connected different counties are to each other. But communication is far from the only way in which we are connected or separated. We can be connected based on where we move, how we speak, and even what sports teams we root for.

So our research team, consisting of DeDe Paul of AT&T, Vincent Blondel of Belgium’s Université catholique de Louvain, IBM’s Dominik Dahlem*, and myself, set out to understand how a variety of cultural and social properties create borders, and whether or not these borders actually overlap. Are there in fact natural boundaries to the borders that we create as social creatures?”

Very interesting to think how this new data we’re collecting is teaching us about ourselves… and how we differ from the way we’ve always thought about ourselves…

“In just over a decade, the international system for mandatory arbitration of domain name disputes has disposed of more than 30,000 disputes, between parties from more than 150 countries, in short timeframes and at low cost. Despite the absence of an appellate body and a doctrine of  stare decisis, the system has evolved a comprehensive and largely on controversial body of precedent, that provides clear guidance to parties on most of the legal and procedural issues involved in a domain name dispute. This paper explores both why and
how, exactly, such a sophisticated precedential system has evolved voluntary, and identifies the lessons that may be drawn from this experience for other arbitration systems.”

Very interesting piece.  Arbitration does not have to be confidential and non-precedent setting.  We need to blow open some of the conventions in arbitration practice if we bring it online.

Josh Constine on TechCrunch:

“Facebook wants you to know it’s listening when you report bullying, hate speech, identity theft, and spam, so today it launched a new Support Dashboard for tracking these reports until they’re resolved. Users can check to see if their report has been reviewed, be notified of whether the offensive content was removed or left up, and learn why the decision was made. The Support Dashboard is gradually rolling out to the Account Settings menu starting today with Facebook tracking Timeline and photo flags there, and monitoring for more content types will be added soon.

Cyberbullying has emerged as huge problem across the Internet and especially on Facebook, whereConsumer Reports says one million children were bullied from June 2010-2011. The Support Dashboard should make users feel more confident about spending time on Facebook because they know if they’re abused and report it, their problems will actually be heard and responded to…”

Big step forward.  Kudos to Dave and the team for making it happen.