Leah Wing has just completed an amazingly well-referenced article for the IJODR on Ethical Principles for Online Dispute Resolution.  This article attempts to consolidate all of the ODR standards work from the past fifteen years into a clear set of principles that should serve to guide the development of global ODR moving forward.  In the article, Leah describes these standards as a “GPS” for the development of the field.  From the abstract:

“As ODR is increasingly incorporated into legislation, regulation and a wide variety of sectors in society, it is timely to explore the importance of ethical principles specifically for ODR. In the hope of contributing to these efforts, this article examines the benefits and challenges of articulating a set of ethical principles to guide the development and implementation of ODR systems, technology and processes.”

This is an important milestone article for the ODR field writ large, and I strongly encourage you to check it out.

Richard Susskind just delivered a talk at University College-London laying out the “Case for Online Courts.”  He specifically mentions the upcoming books on ODR, Digital Justice (Katsh, Rabinovich-Einy) and New Handshake (Schmitz and Rule).  Check it out.

From the announcement:

“The ABA Section of Dispute Resolution has selected Ethan Katsh, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as the recipient of the 2017 D’Alemberte-Raven Award. Professor Katsh is widely recognized as the founder of the field of online dispute resolution (ODR). Along with Janet Rifkin, he conducted the eBay Pilot Project in 1999 that led to eBay’s current system that handles over sixty million disputes each year.”

Read the full text of the announcement here.

Congrats, Ethan!

On December 16th, the UN General Assembly adopted a Resolution regarding the Technical Notes generated by UNCITRAL’s ODR Working Group.

The Resolution reads, in part:

“The General Assembly:
1. Expresses its appreciation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law for preparing and adopting the Technical Notes on Online
Dispute Resolution as annexed to the report of the Commission on the work of its forty-ninth session;
2. Requests the Secretary-General to publish the text of the Technical Notes through all appropriate means, including electronically, in the six official languages of the United Nations, and to disseminate that text broadly to Governments and other interested bodies;
3. Recommends that all States and other stakeholders use the Technical Notes in designing and implementing online dispute resolution systems for crossborder commercial transactions;
4. Requests all States to support the promotion and use of the Technical Notes.”

You can read the full text of the Resolution here.

The registration link is now live for the 2017 ODR Working Group meeting in Paris!

Click here to reserve your spot.

Full information about the conference is available on the ICC web site, at ODR2017.org, or via the Save the Date flyer.

Hope to see you there…

The Judicial Joint Technology Committee released a new Resource Bulletin on November 30th exploring ODR and its utility within courts, entitled “Online Dispute Resolution and the Courts.”  Here is the abstract:

“What began as a niche tool for non-binding, out-of-court dispute resolution between private parties, Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) has grown to become a distinct and particularly effective dispute resolution mechanism encompassing a broad array of artificial intelligence technologies used to resolve a growing variety of business, consumer, and even international disputes. Some courts have successfully piloted ODR for landlord-tenant, small claims, and domestic disputes, and for minor criminal cases such as traffic and code enforcement violations. ODR presents opportunities for courts to expand services while simultaneously improving customer experience and satisfaction. This Quick Response Guide provides a basic primer in Online Dispute Resolution and lays out implementation models as well as court-specific opportunities and considerations.”

Read the full report here.

The Geneva Internet Dispute Resolution Policies 1.0 (GIDRP 1.0) have just launched at www.geneva-internet-disputes.ch

The GIDRP 1.0 project has emerged as a result of an international conference that took place at the University of Geneva on 17 – 18 June 2015, at which experts presented and discussed selected facets of the numerous legal challenges surrounding Internet-related disputes (www.internet-disputes.ch).

In the months following the conference, a team of researchers from the University of Geneva took up the mission to draft policy proposals on the following four issues:
– Which national courts shall have jurisdiction in Internet-related disputes ?
– How to structure an alternative dispute resolution system for Internet-related disputes ?
– How shall disputes about the licensing of Standard Essential Patents (SEP) under Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms be solved?
– How shall immunities apply on the Internet?

The GIDRP 1.0 is a digital policy project: it is not carved in stone and is not even materialized in any paper publication. The reason for this is that the GIDRP 1.0 is conceived as a work in progress (more precisely: a policy work in progress), that must be discussed, criticized and improved by a process of broad consultation and inclusive participation.

Learn more at www.geneva-internet-disputes.ch, and contact the program administrator at gidrp@unige.ch if you have an interest in participating in the next steps of the project which may materialize in GIDRP 2.0.

Over the past several years, Justin Corbett has captured, cataloged, and analyzed metadata from over 50,000 conflict-related search terms that are collectively entered into search engines nearly a quarter billion times annually. These terms have been tracked at the County-level (in each of the US’ more than 3,100 Counties) and parsed into 225 distinct conflict contexts that represent the ADR field’s many current and probable future specialty practice areas. It’s a project that combines dispute resolution, technology, and data.

The Japan Consumer Network (Jaconet) has launched an ODR research project.  Information in English on Jaconet is available here:

http://www.japanconsumernetwork.org/english.html

Information on the  ODR Research Project, available only in Japanese, is available here:

http://www.japanconsumernetwork.org/odr307403135020250.html

Also available (only in Japanese) is the  “Report of the Research Project regarding Resolution of Transboundary E-Commerce Troubles (ODR Research Project)”, issued on July 20, 2016.

http://www.japanconsumernetwork.org/odr307403135020250225772157826360.html

The full report is available in .DOC format here: http://myspace.private.coocan.jp/odr/2015/2015_main.docx

For non-Japanese speakers, after summarizing the current framework for resolving transboundary E-commerce troubles, Jaconet  proposes that “Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency or METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) should establish a study forum for constructing ODR system. The study should aim at creating a prototype of ODR based on discussion of related parties, and conducting demonstration experiments by applying it in practice.”

(h/t Hiroki for the links and translation)

New ODR article from Robert Condlin at the University of Maryland entitled: “Online Dispute Resolution: Stinky, Repugnant, or Drab”

From the abstract:

“Scholars, judges, and the organized Bar have begun to see Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) as a partial answer to the “access to justice” problem faced by people of limited means, and even the “wave of the future” for most if not all forms of civil dispute resolution. Attracted by the possibility of faster, cheaper, and more convenient dispute resolution, companies, states of the union, and countries around the world now have begun to create ODR programs on a scale that makes the process, along with outsourcing, AI-based practice management software, and non-traditional legal service providers, one of the principal forces redefining the traditional practice of law.

Often overlooked in this cost and convenience über alles perspective is whether the cheap and efficient processing of disputes is a capitulation to the conditions of modern society more than a superior system for administering justice. Most ODR programs require parties to describe their claims in fixed, predefined categories that may or may not capture all of the claims’ dimensions; limit the opportunity to argue the substantive merits underlying the claims worth; and resolve differences on the basis of private software algorithms that raise fairness issues not present in dispute resolution systems run principally by humans. It’s a little too soon to know if this “wave” of the future breaks on the beach or the rocks.”

Read more: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2873918