From “Angelina Jolie’s Lawyer Now Offers Quickie Divorces Online,” by Amy Sohn in The New York Times, Feb. 3 2018:

‘Since couples now meet online, plan weddings online, cheat online and find couples therapists online, it is only logical that they should be able to divorce online.

It’s Over Easy is a new website that takes couples through divorce for a starting fee of $750. It is either liberating in its convenience (remember in the Rosalind Russell film “The Women” when the disgruntled wives had to fly to a dude ranch in Reno, Nev.?) or another sign of pending apocalypse.

More curiously, it was founded not by some fly-by-night 1-800-SPLIT-NOW type but by Laura Wasser, the affluent Beverly Hills-adjacent lawyer who has represented Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears, Jennifer Garner and Christina Aguilera, among other famous clients.

Ms. Wasser introduced the site privately to about a dozen of her friends and acquaintances in Los Angeles in the summer. Since late January, it has been available to the public in California and in New York, with plans to expand to Nevada, Oregon, Florida and Texas this year.

To promote these developments Ms. Wasser recently appeared on “Good Morning America” and spoke at the SoHo branch of the women’s club the Wing in New York, telling a lovelorn separated woman during a Q. and A. that in trying to punish her husband by dragging her feet on divorce, she was actually punishing herself. This week, an ad for It’s Over Easy appeared on the Nasdaq building, featuring an enormous head-to-toe image of the glamorous, honey-haired Ms. Wasser, with the headline “ONLINE DIVORCE AVAILABLE NOW.”’

Read more here

The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) has released two new reports on court connected ODR:

1. JTC Resource Bulletin: Case Studies in ODR for Courts: A view from the front lines
2. JTC Resource Bulletin: ODR for Courts

For those outside the US, the NCSC is the organization courts turn to for authoritative knowledge and information, because it collaborates closely with the Conference of Chief Justices, the Conference of State Court Administrators, and other associations of judicial leaders.  NCSC’s leadership in promoting ODR in the courts is hugely legitimizing, and is likely to spark enormous interest on the part of Court Administrative Officers and Chief Justices in the US over 2018.

From the report:

“For more than 20 years, Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) has been used effectively to resolve individual-to-individual e-commerce disputes. Increasingly, it is being used in innovative applications unique to the judiciary. While ODR is a new concept for courts, it is not a theory or a “bleeding-edge” technology. It is a proven tool with a documentable record of success over a sustained period of time: billions of disputes have been resolved outside of court using ODR. Significant opportunities exist for courts to leverage ODR to expand services while simultaneously reducing costs and improving the public’s experience and therefore, satisfaction. For those reasons, it is becoming central to the discussion of the future of courts.

In its 2016 recommendations entitled Call to Action: Achieving Civil Justice for All, the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) observes that navigating civil courts can be daunting and “those who enter the system confront a maze-like process that costs too much and takes too long.” The report notes that services should improve in step with changing needs and the development of new technologies, but goes on to lament that “courts lack any of the user-friendly support we rely on in other sectors.” Recommendation 13 of the CCJ report implores courts to “take all necessary steps to increase convenience to litigants by simplifying the court-litigant interface and creating on-demand court assistance services.” As such, “on-demand court assistance” must go beyond basic informational webpages or online payment portals.

A more public-facing use of technology, ODR takes the benefits of technology much further. While courts are using technology effectively to improve case management and administrative processes and to address federal disposition reporting requirements, ODR has the potential to dramatically expand the public’s access to justice and improve their experience with justice processes.”

Read more…

PLEASE NOTE THE NEW DATES: NOVEMBER 14-15, 2018

The New Zealand Centre for ICT Law, in the School of Law at Auckland University, will host the 18th ODR Forum, on 14th and 15 November, 2018. Join your international colleagues in Auckland – consistently voted one of the world’s top ten “livable” cities – to explore current developments in the rapidly evolving world of digital platforms, portals, networks and courts.

The two key themes for the 2018 Forum are Innovation and Impact. The first, which will be the focus for presentations on the 14th November, will explore updates and developments in the world of taking dispute and justice systems online. The second theme, for the 15th, will address some of the challenges and critical questions that arise through moving beyond innovation into the disruptions that digital justice can create. This “impact” discussion may show that these can be ambivalent developments, in both fostering access to legal and other resources, and challenging other norms.

Central to the discussion at this Forum will be a comparative survey of recent developments in online courts and tribunals, underscoring the central role of digital technologies in the ongoing evolution of legal systems and access to justice. These developments also reinforce the ‘maturation’ of ODR beyond what might have been seen as a digital variant of ADR.

To learn more, just visit the conference website.

The Asia Pacific Mediation Forum will be taking place from November 11-13, 2017 in Da Nang, Vietnam.  It promises to be an incredible gathering with speakers in a wide variety of areas — with more than 10 sessions alone on ODR.

We hope you can join us!

Learn more at https://apmf2017.mediation.vn/

Interesting piece forthcoming in the Floria State Law Review by C. Steven Bradford of the University of Nebraska College of Law, focused on the use of online arbitration to handle disputes arising from fraud in crowd funding websites like Kickstarter and Gofundme.  From the abstract:

“Arbitration is cheaper, but even ordinary arbitration will often be too expensive for the small amounts invested in crowdfunding. In this article, I attempt to design a simplified, cost-effective arbitration remedy to deal with crowdfunding fraud. The arbitration remedy should be unilateral; crowdfunding issuers should be obligated to arbitrate, but not investors. Crowdfunding arbitration should be online, with the parties limited to written submissions. But it should be public, and arbitrators should be required to publish their findings. The arbitrators should be experts on both crowdfunding and securities law, and they should take an active, inquisitorial role in developing the evidence. Finally, all of the investors in an offering should be able to consolidate their claims into an arbitration class action.”

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The Indian Law Ministry has issued a statement urging government agencies to use fast track dispute resolution to work through the backlog of court cases awaiting resolution.  From The Times of India:

“NEW DELHI: The law ministry has asked government departments to go for online arbitration to fast track dispute resolution… ‘Presently there are more than three crore cases pending in various courts of the country and 46% of these involve government departments or government bodies. Hence, the department of justice is keen to explore options for government departments for settlement of their disputes through alternate methods,’ the ministry has said.

To cut litigation, ministries have been advised not to go to court for their disputes and instead opt for arbitration. ‘This may help courts to concentrate on access to justice to people in better manner,’ the ministry noted. Many of these agencies provide services of retired judges, senior advocates, chartered accountants, retired civil servants for mediation. Providing a list of such agencies on its website, the law ministry has said the departments may select from them according to their choice and can use their services which will ‘help to a great extent in reducing government litigations’.”

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The website of the new Internet Court in Hangzhou, China is now live.

The court is aimed at focusing on:

1. Online shopping contract disputes
2. Online shopping product liability disputes
3. Online service contract disputes
4. Loan contract disputes and small loan contract disputes
5. Online copyright disputes

It offers a simple three-step approach:

• Step one: Filing
  Registration and name certification, as well as complaint completion. After the user is authorized, the system supports the investigation of e-commerce, transactions, logistics, micro-credit, intellectual property and other information.
• Step two: Mediation
  After the case is filed, the first pre-litigation mediation. Within fifteen days, the mediator contacts the parties, through online, telephone or video mediation.
• Step three: Court
  If the mediation is unsuccessful, the case is formally submitted to the court, where it proceeds to final decision — including the online payment of litigation costs.

Visit the Hangzhou Internet Court website to learn more.

Stanford is hosting a one day summit on Law and Design.  From the summit web page:

“At our Law + Design day, we will hear from people at the cutting-edge of design and law, and then use the design process ourselves to define a forward agenda.

Our keynote speech will make clear what a ‘design approach’ means, and how other domains have used it to radically transform systems.

We will hear from people who have been experimenting with user-centered legal services, communications, and products. And then we will work together, using the design process, to define new prototypes and initiatives.

This summit will be both practical and provocative. We will discuss how to bring innovation into your legal organization, while also experimenting with what transformative new designs might be possible.”

An invitation is required to attend, but you can request one via a form on the web site — and there is no cost.  Learn more.

h/t to Michael and Andy for the heads up on this recent announcement indicating support from President Xi Jinping for the Hangzhou Internet Court (apologies for the low quality Google Translate translation, but you can click the link to see the original Mandarin) :

“General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, the President of the Central Military Commission Chairman of the Central Committee to deepen the reform of the leading group leader Xi Jinping June 26 morning to convene the central comprehensive reform of the leading group of the thirty-sixth meeting and published an important speech.  He stressed that focusing on systematic, holistic and synergy is an inherent requirement for deepening reform and an important way to promote reform…

The meeting stressed that the establishment of Hangzhou Internet Court, the judicial initiative to adapt to the development trend of the Internet a major institutional innovation. In accordance with the law orderly, active and secure, follow the rules of the law to meet the requirements of the masses, to explore the rules of the litigation case, improve the trial mechanism to enhance the effectiveness of the trial, in order to maintain network security, resolve network disputes, promote the Internet and economic and social depth integration, etc. to provide judicial protection…”

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Daniel Dimov has released his dissertation on CODR, or Crowdsourced Dispute Resolution:

“Although crowdsourced online dispute resolution (CODR) is one of the newest forms of dispute resolution, it has gained tremendous success. For example, Taobao User Dispute Resolution System resolved 238,000 online-shopping disputes in 2013 and attracted more than 575,000 crowd jurors from December 2012 to July 2014. To compare, in the second quarter of 2014, English courts dealt with just 11,100 civil (excluding family) hearings or trials. The difference between Taobao User Dispute Resolution System and the English court system lies not only in the number of cases which each of them resolves, but also in the fact that the jurors participating in the Chinese CODR procedure do not get any remuneration.”

I’ve been reading it today and it’s very thorough and well done.  I think this is the most in-depth analysis of crowdsourced ODR every completed, and it will be of great interest for ODR researchers and students.  I definitely recommend checking it out.

From his Supervisor Prof.dr. H.J. van den Herik: “In Crowdsourced Online Dispute Resolution Daniel Dimov has achieved a breakthrough in thinking on dispute resolution. Dimov’s dissertation provides a clear answer to the question of the role of ODR in the judicial system. It should be Crowdsourced ODR. His dissertation shows the developments occurring in  law and information technology: CODR is cheap, fast, democratic and fair. Daniel Dimov has demonstrated tremendous tenacity in combining his ideas on CODR with our interpretation of objective procedural fairness.”

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