Once again, ’tis the season!
Cyberweek 2016 will kick off on October 31st on www.ADRHub.com, with a full program of webinars and conversations focusing on ODR.
Register for Cyberweek (participation is free of cost) at https://odrcyberweek2016.eventbrite.com, and you will receive updates, the full program, and instructions for participation in the events.
See you all inside!
ODR2016 was held in Beijing September 18-20 and the following document was adopted:
ODR 2016 Beijing
Beijing Consensus
The world faces a tremendous challenge with the exponential growth of cross-border transactions and disputes. The Internet has significantly lowered the barriers to cross-border transactions and communication, resulting in large numbers of disputes. Two recent projections underscore the urgent need for novel avenues for addressing cross-jurisdictional and other online disputes. For one, in the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, it was projected that cross-border e-commerce will involve 2 billion customers by the year 2020. In correlation with the growing number of cross-border commercial transactions, another recent projection is that the number of disputes will continue to rise sharply, reaching a pinnacle of one billion e-commerce disputes annually by 2017, and a million disputes a day by 2020. Addressing these disputes will be a major challenge to the construction of sustainable and healthy trade and social relations in an Internet society.
Against the challenges of the 21st century, ODR has much to offer as it has proven to be an invaluable channel, enhancing access to justice in a global digital world. ODR has been successfully used across the globe in the domain of e-commerce, social media, family disputes and a variety of other sectors. ODR nowadays has applications for both ADR and court processes and there are a growing number of ODR tools and systems some of which rely on human intervention, others employing a fully automated process, and those that are hybrid processes.
At this point we further believe that the time is ripe for the articulation of, and the commitment to, a set of ethical principles specifically designed for developing and conducting ODR. The adoption of principles would further increase trust in ODR and the e-commerce setting and ensure the delivery of high quality ODR processes. There are Ethical Principles for ODR developed collaboratively by the ODR community that can provide an anchor for such an endeavor (http://odr.info/ethics-and-odr/).
Hence, the 2016 ODR Beijing forum calls for further collaboration among states, enterprises, universities, institutes, researchers and practitioners engaged in relevant areas of research and practice to further advance these overarching ethical principles of ODR and work together to further the use and quality of ODR, a vital component of a digital age justice ecosystem.
New Australian ODR provider Guided Resolution has now made their platform available for academics who would like to give their students an ODR platform to use for simulations and exercises. They’re just put out a new brochure detailing the functionality of the system and how it can be used in education. From the brochure:
To learn more, view the brochure here, or contact Guided Resolution’s CEO, Ross Paull, at rp@guidedresolution.com.au.
New Zealand radio did a segment on ODR today that specifically mentions the Rechtwijzer and Fairway: “Can robots make good judges? Phil Pennington investigates the crossroads between artificial intelligence and justice.”
“Lord Justice Briggs has today published his final report into the structure of the civil courts: The Civil Courts Structure Review (CCSR)…
The final report follows an extensive series of meetings with judges, practitioners, stakeholders and users of the civil courts, and a series of detailed written and oral submissions following the publication of the review’s interim report in January 2016.
The review makes a series of recommendations intended to inform the current programme of wider court modernisation being undertaken by HM Courts and Tribunals Service… These are summarised below:
Read the full report here.
Roger Smith, the legendary writer and thinker on legal services, has a new blog chronicling the advances in technology and access to justice.
The blog has some excellent advice about the current state of ODR, particularly from the Ministry/Court perspective. From his latest post:
“My own advice (would that anyone would listen) to any Ministry or Court wishing to dip its toe into the waters of ODR is: wait; see what works and what does not. The chances are HiiL and Modria will come through well but some systems – probably those built in house – will fail. Watch; wait; prepare; move decisively into the market in 2018. But, who in these days of instant movement and rapid technological change wants to hear boringly sensible advice like that?”
Definitely worth the browsing time. Read more at http://law-tech-a2j.org/
The Hague Institute for Innovations in Law (HiiL) has just released their latest Trend report titled “ODR and the Courts; The promise of 100% access to justice?” This report will be distributed to the world’s judiciary, executive, legal professionals, innovators and wider ODR community. It comes directly out of the conversations at ODR2016.org, which was hosted by HiiL and held in The Hague a few weeks ago. This report is the product of a huge pooling of collective experience across many sectors, and it will likely make a big splash within legal and judicial communities around the world.
From the Executive Summary:
“The report, bringing together best practices from various legal systems, illustrates how citizens, courts, ministries of justice and the legal profession can all gain from broad implementation of ODR and related procedural innovation. Courts can improve the services to citizens, regain their market share and avoid being overburdened. Government budgets for courts and legal aid can be brought under control by a smart system of user fees for better services to citizens. The law firms working for individuals, now often struggling as a business, can add more value to more people’s lives and serve more people more effectively and efficiently. What is needed is a coordinated effort to open up the legal framework so that new roles and procedural models can freely emerge and be continuously improved.”
The first ODR2016 International Forum at the Hague in May was a great success. There will be a second ODR2016 International Forum this year. It will be held in Beijing September 19-20 (with optional tours on September 18 and 21). Information about the Beijing Forum is at http://uibesz.org/xygg/shownews.php?lang=cn&id=230 If you have any questions about attending, would like to make a presentation or would like an invitation (which you will need to obtain a visa), please email our host, Andy Lee of the The Unversity of International Business and Economics at anyu.lee@gmail-in-China or his associate Angela Zhu at odr2016@163.com or angelazjx@126.com. I hope that we will see you there.
Ethan Katsh
Director, National Center for Technology
and Dispute Resolution
The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) has just released a paper that calls for the implementation of the Rechtwijzer/MyLawBC ODR portal to courts in the United States. This paper is based on a two-day conference convened by IAALS at the University of Denver in June 2016. The paper calls for the creation of a “Family Law Portal” (FLP) that will have a large ODR component. From the report:
“To help plan for the FLP, at the A Court Compass for Litigants convening, attendees were shown two tools designed to help people resolve their family law issues: Rechtwijzer 2.0 used in the Netherlands and MyLawBC used in British Columbia. The latter replicates the functionality of the former and adds an additional Guided Pathways feature. The features common to both include an online dispute resolution (“ODR”) system that helps families that are getting divorced with a minimum of judicial intervention. This process is based upon a concept developed for resolving consumer disputes on eBay—a system that resolves over 60 million disputes a year. The parties start the process online by following guided interviews that help them identify the issues and learn ways to resolve them. If the parties reach an impasse on an issue, they can request the assistance of a professional mediator.23 Again, this is all within the online system. Should they not be able to reach agreement through mediation, 24 they can request a decision on the issue from a non-judicial hearing examiner. At the end of the process, the parties have a settlement agreement that will be filed with the court and signed by a judge.”
The report further recommends that the Rechtwijzer/MyLawBC platform be extended to multiple courts in the US to test its effectiveness in the US market. From the conclusion:
“Rather than reinventing the wheel, IAALS proposes to replicate the features of Rechtwijzer and MyLawBC on a platform that can be scaled throughout the United States. In addition to the features described, it will incorporate the work that is being done by the Stanford Design School to facilitate natural language search inquiries, so that users do not need to cite legalese. The Stanford project plans to work with Google to identify the terms “real people” use when looking
for answers to their legal problems. This natural language approach will be used throughout the process.”
The full report can be read here.
The event will take place at the Provincial University of Córdoba in Argentina. It’ll gather specialists and academics from the western world to expose and debate different approaches reagarding ADR/ODR Methods and Procedural Reforms.
