Jim W Hildreth, a private and court appointed mediator active in both California & Louisiana, has released a new skill for Amazon Echo called My Mediator.

From his article on Mediate.com about the new skill:

“Alexa has a Mediation Skill.
Amazon #AskAlexa, just approved the first Mediation skill on the planet.
Take a guess–it’s called My Mediator.
Its under the Skill  Business and Finance.
The description is My Mediator for Alexa can give details on how to resolve California Real Estate Disputes via Mediation versus Litigation.
Deposit Disputes, Probates, Partnerships, non-disclosure are examples used.”

I just installed it on our Echo here in the Modria office and tried it out — very interesting.  One day, we all may rely on devices like Echo and Google Home to counsel us when we encounter a disagreement.

You can add the skill to your Echo here.

An announcement from the EU on March 24th indicates that the new EU ODR platform has handled more than 24,00 cases since launching last year.  More than a third of the complaints concerned cross-border purchases within the EU. Most complaints were about clothing and footwear, airline tickets and information and communication technology goods.

From the press release:

“While there are strong rules in place in the EU to protect consumers, in practice consumers sometimes encounter problems getting redress when their rights are violated, particularly cross border.

When consumers have made their purchase online, they should also be able to solve such problems online. Be it a seller refusing to repair a defective laptop within the guarantee period, or a travel agent not willing to refund a ruined holiday, such disputes can be settled faster and cheaper online and outside the court, via an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform, launched by the Commission on 15 February 2016.

Věra Jourová, Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, said: “While we are still in an early phase of this new tool, we can already say that the Online Dispute Resolution platform has been well received by consumers. We also see that the mere fact of a consumer using the platform often is incentive enough for traders to resolve the dispute. We are giving consumers a practical tool to help them benefit from their rights in practice. On the other side, traders also have a lot to gain from this platform and should use it more. Particularly for online traders it is essential to be seen as reliable by potential consumers. Using this tool will help them earn consumer trust, whilst providing them with a simple and fast way of resolving disputes.”

Examples

• A consumer from Italy complained about a defective ICT product bought from an online trader in Belgium. The platform sent the complaint to the competent dispute resolution body in Belgium. As a result, the Italian consumer was reimbursed.
• A consumer from Luxembourg complained about a car rented online from a trader in Greece. The platform sent the complaint to the competent dispute resolution body in Greece. The dispute was amicably settled within 60 days. The trader fully reimbursed the additional expenses incurred by the consumer.
• The platform often also works as a channel of first contact between the parties and a solution is often found bilaterally without taking the complaint to a dispute resolution body. For example, A Belgian consumer had been complaining for months about a defective dryer to a Belgian trader, with no success. When the trader received the complaint via the platform, he contacted the consumer and offered to replace the dryer with a new one.

Read more: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-727_en.htm

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.