Liveblogging #ODR2015: What does it mean to Incorporate ODR into Court Practice and Procedure: A Comparative Approach

I’m here at the #ODR2015 conference at Pace Law School. ODR2015 is the annual meeting of the Online Dispute Resolution Forum, an international assembly of lawyers, mediators, technologists, and others who care about technology and dispute resolution. It is cohosted by the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, where I am a fellow.

This liveblog represents a best-efforts account, not a direct transcript, of the lecture, presentation, and/or panel.

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The second session at ODR2015 is a panel titles “What does it mean to Incorporate ODR into Court Practice and Procedure: A Comparative Approach.” It’s moderated by Dan Weitz, Statewide Alternative Dispute Resolution Coordinator, New York Office of Court Administration. Panel participants include:

• Bettina ‘Betsy’ Plevan, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP who serves on New York Chief Judge’s Task Force on Access to Justice.
• Graham Ross, a lawyer and mediator from the United Kingdom, and a member at the Civil Justice Council’s ODR Advisory Group
• Jeff Aresty, President of the Internet Bar Organization, who will be talking about hacking for justice in Texas
• Prof. Alberto Elisavetsky, Director of Online Dispute Resolution Latinoamerica who will be talking about ODR & the judiciary in Latin America

First up is Betsy, who discusses her career in alternative dispute resolution (which lately has been in technologically mediated forms) for many years, leading up to a 2013 report that proposed a pilot platform that would help mediate consumer disputes in the state of New York. The pilot project would be designed to assess the suitability of ODR for consumer debt litigation, which is especially high volume and may be more amenable to electronic mediation than other categories of dispute, and, while not mandatory, is ‘assumed participation.’ There is no fee, and once a case is initiated, a mediator is appointed, parties are notified, and allowed to upload documents, chat with mediators and counterparties about possible resolutions. If the pilot succeeds in this context, the task force will investigate whether and how the model can be expanded to more categories of disputes. They hope to launch the pilot in this calendar year.

Next up is Graham, who reminds the audience that the EU-wide ODR platform should be launching in the UK next month. According to the European Commission, “consumers who encounter a problem with an online purchase will be able to submit a complaint online through the ODR platform, in the language of their choice. The ODR platform will notify the trader that a complaint is lodged against him. The consumer and the trader will then agree on which ADR entity to use to solve their dispute. When they agree, the chosen ADR entity will receive the details of the dispute via the ODR platform.” Graham is an advisor to Modria, an ODR platform spun out from the eBay buyer/seller dispute codebase, and he notes that the top judge in the UK has argued that “the courts can learn from eBay.” The goals of systems like Modria, Graham says, is what its founder Colin Rule (like your author, a fellow at NCTDR) calls ‘rough justice,’ where rough is meant in the sense of ‘approximate’/’good enough’ for the real needs of everyday people, who are underserved (and overcharged) by traditional legal processes. Graham discusses how, as part of this ODR process, the EU has been trying to reconceptualize what ‘access to justice’ means, and what processes, institutions, and standards are required in order to achieve the end goal.

Next up is Jeff, who will be talking about the tech for justice hackathon run by the Internet Bar Association in Austin this past February. According to the IBO:

This legal hackathon gathered programmers, lawyers, technologists, UI& UE designers, public and private sector organizations and government agencies to tackle how to allow EVERYONE to avail themselves of our justice system, or to find methods of achieving informal justice. With buy-in and support from leadership of the Texas state legal system, the hackathon put shoulder-to-shoulder those working on the frontlines of access to justice for the poor and the powerless with young innovators, programmers and entrepreneurs.

Jeff says that the chief justice of Texas came to the hackathon and talked about how, as a young man, he (the chief justice) had reprogrammed his commodore 64 to perform certain document assembly tasks he needed done as a young lawyer, and proclaimed himself a fellow hacker too.

The biggest challenge, said Jeff, was narrowing down the field of what ‘justice’ meant for the purpose of this hackathon. For the Austin hackathon, they framed the problem as ‘resolving issues that manifest between parents living in difference households but raising the same children.’ They brought in tech and law mentors to work with the teams and help them understand the constraints and opportunities that both domains provided their projects. The ultimate goal, says Jeff, was not so much the projects, but to engage the stakeholders, especially non-tech savvy judges and administrators, to help envision new possibilities for technology that improves justice. The next tech for justice hackathon will be in New Mexico.

Last up is Prof. Alberto Elisavetsky, who has traveled here from Argentina to talk about ODRLatinoAmerica. He notes that the Ministry of Justice in Argentina has been working on ODR programs and practicess since 2012. The Argentinian ADR/ODR practices grew initially out of government programs designed to support low-income families who could not travel between the two main judicial organizations in Argentina, which are nearly 1000 miles apart. Another project that his organization is working on is trying to build ODR systems to mediate disputes involving undocumented immigrants in the United States with their families in Mexico (either as counterparties or coparties). There is also a new consumer code in Brazil that envisions a standard ODR network similar to what the EU is implementing presently. Elisavetsky hopes to work with fellow attendees of ODR2015 to figure out ways to help grow ODR further across Latin America.