No sooner had Colin Rule addressed my students at New York Law School but we met each other again in Washington, DC, where he was on a panel on online dispute resolution at the Annual Meeting of the ABA’s Section on Dispute Resolution. Colin’s seven years with EBay/Paypal, combined with his new start-up Modria, have turned that sparkle in his eye to a glint. He sees the future, does Colin, and it doesn’t include lawyers — or the law.
Med-Arb and other hybrid processes have been received with reluctance in the United States and UK, mainly because of ethical concerns of the arbitrator. Outside of common law countries, however, the legal culture has been more welcoming to the involvement of an adjudicator — whether a judge or an arbitrator — in settlement discussions. This range of views was the topic of a panel discussion at the UIA’s recent World Mediation Forum in Lisbon, Portugal.
At the recent Annual Meeting of the CPR Institute in New York, Cornell Professor David B. Lipsky presented some of the results from a recent survey of the Fortune 1000, comparing the current use of ADR with the use that was reported in a similar survey in 1997. The results are very interesting and, for the most part, good news.
As a final report on the proceedings of the recent IBA Annual Conference, on Thursday November 3 Jane Player and I co-chaired a Panel on “The Use of ADR in the Management and Control of Dispute-Related Costs.” Read more »
