ODR Practice

Later this month, Colin Rule, Susan Exon, and I will collaborate on a panel at an ADR conference sponsored by the Law Review at La Verne School of Law in California. My topic will be one that I have been thinking about a lot over the past year or so: the apparent divide between the requirements for fourth parties and the approach to ODR taken by practitioners working in e-commerce and those of us working in what would be considered the more “traditional” ADR venues.

I made some comments about this in the “Algorithm vs. Art” presentation that I did in Buenos Aires last June, and I have continued to think that the divide is real. There is a lot of development work afoot in the e-commerce arena, with the work being done at eBay and the UNCITRAL project that is developing an international dispute resolution system for e-commerce, and much more. E-commerce generates a mountain of disputes, falling within some reasonably narrow parameters, with a low expectation of F2F interaction, a limited expectation of the parties having an ongoing relationship, etc. Those of us who do more “traditional” work see a lower volume of disputes, issues that are a bit more complex or messy, with a high expectation of F2F interaction, and the probability of ongoing relationships. Most of the platforms that have been developed for traditional venues have not been runaway financial successes, but there is an increasing use of ICT applications not specifically designed for ODR, but which fulfill some functions that are basic to dispute resolution.

Colin and Susan have recently written about the ethical considerations of ODR, and I think the increasing use of various applications has sparked a real need to concentrate on the impact of technology on the ethics and practice of dispute resolution more generally.