ODR2016

ODR 2016 showed they were taking digitalization seriously, with digital entry tickets and the conference program in a smartphone app. The 15th ODR (Online Dispute Resolution) Conference was held on May 23 and 24th in The Hague in the beautiful conference hall of the Peace Palace. There is a lot of experimenting going on ODR and there are lessons to be learned from those experiments. And because this time the meeting was in the Netherlands, it provided the Netherlands Justice sector with a great opportunity to show what we are doing: what has been realized, what we're working on, and our plans for the future. People were impressed: one participant exclaimed:”I have seen the future, and it is in Dutch!” Here a small collection of my souvenirs from the conference.

Rechtwijzer 2.0

This web site, Rechtwijzer uit elkaar, helps couples wanting to separate make a plan for the divorce and then also arrange for it. Until now, about 250 couples have done so in actual practice. User surveys show that they are satisfied. There is extensive interaction with users to further improve its effectiveness. This tool was developed by HiiL Innovating Justice and Modria dispute resolution systems and the Netherlands Legal Aid Board.  

DemanderJustice: the Uber of the legal world

DemanderJustice (DJ) is a French site where for about €40 people can try to settle a dispute. If this is unsuccessful, it supports bringing the case before a judge for another €70. This works for cases under €10,000, which can be brought to court without a lawyer. At the time of writing, the site had handled more than 250,000 cases. About half were settled; the claiming party won in more than 80% of the cases that were taken to court. The French Bar filed a complaint against DJ for unauthorized exercise of a protected profession. DJ was acquitted of the criminal charge in two instances; the complaints still continue.

Quality and Innovation: Tomorrow’s Judges

KEI  is the acronym for the Dutch courts’ Quality and Innovation program. Working digitally by itself is not enough: it requires a different kind of judge. Tomorrow’s judges will direct cases more actively. The judiciary must become more accessible and more understandable. Supervising judges, in charge of bankruptcy and guardianships, have large amounts of information at their disposal, so they are better able to act on the patterns they discern.

Digital proceedings: learning from experience
Experience with court digitalization, for instance with the eKantonrechter, has produced a lot of questions which are important for the further development of online dispute resolution. By far the most important question is how to involve the defending party in the procedure. Resolving a dispute amicably is often unsuccessful; the claiming party has no choice but to take the case to court. Digital access for the defending party turns out to be a difficult problem everywhere in Europe because digital IDs are not yet good enough to ascertain who enters the court portal and gets access to the case file.

Another question is, how courts can be better geared to the problems they were set up to resolve. 10 years ago, the legal viewpoint was that if someone had a problem, they would take it to a lawyer, and the lawyer would take it to court for you. That viewpoint was wrong. We now know a lot more about what people do they when they have a problem. Solving a problem may well look more like a network or a cloud than a linear chain of events. What does that mean for the administration of justice as a problem solver? And what to do with this observation from a legal aid insurer: our customers want to be more actively involved in the procedure. They are well-informed, the Internet provides them with oil the information they need and they want to be in control of what happens in the case.

I expect there will be more and more people who represent themselves in court; because they are better able to or because they cannot afford legal aid. The Dutch courts will start working on this issue very shortly.

Competition, consecutive or integration?
Participants in the conference could vote about the relationship between ODR and court procedures: Should they compete to improve quality, should ODR be limited to pretrial situations, or should ODR and court procedures be fully integrated? At the end of the conference participants overwhelmingly voted for complete integration. I think this shows we have managed to convince the participants that courts can actually realize digital proceedings.

Experience, rather than plans

The difficulty about things like online dispute resolution is that only users can see how they work. There are logins, and usually a fee to be paid. I had hoped to see a lot of online dispute resolution in actioin gecause I would like to learn to better gear our digital court procedurres to effective ODR. The conference had a series of five-minute pitches, some of which showed their product, but most did not. For the rest, speakers presented a lot of plans. Her Majesty's Online Court (HMOC), part of a large four-year plan in the UK, attracted a lot of attention. I blogged about it last year. Granted, for innovation one needs a plan. However, experience with plans show they almost never realize what they promise. And although they may have some partial results, in the planning phase there are few lessons to be learned from them.