South by Southwest Festival: Justice 2.0 panel/a>.
Next Monday morning in Austin, at the South by Southwest Festival, there will be a panel on how a justice system for the Internet is being created via Online Dispute Resolution.
The internet needs a justice system, just like the face-to-face world. But the courts are too tied to geography and physical enforcement to provide fair redress online. The most effective approach to building this new system is Online Dispute Resolution, or ODR. ODR enables the construction of low-cost, cross-border resolution systems that are independent of any one nation’s jurisdiction, which better mirrors the structure of the internet.
The panel would discuss online dispute resolution systems that are already in operation, such as for eBay’s system (which resolves 60m disputes per year, many times more than the US court system), as well as how ODR could create an enlightened international justice system to improve global access to justice.
The panelists include the following:
Beth Trent, SVP, Intl Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution
Beth Trent is Senior Vice President and Director of Programs for the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution. She is also a member of the United States Delegation to the UNICITRAL Online Dispute Resolution Working Group. She spent the first 11 years of her career as a litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where her work was largely focused on complex multi-jurisdictional matters. She was litigation counsel at both GE Capital and Schering-Plough, where she pioneered early case assessment and ran complex litigation. In her roles at both companies, Beth led teams that used ADR strategies to resolve complex disputes with federal and state entities, including DOJ, FTC and the Attorney’s General of all fifty states. Beth was also a risk manager and compliance director at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a legal and compliance consultant to a privately owned technology and investment company. She has a JD from the University of Virginia and a BA from Oberlin College.
Colin Rule, Co-Founder, COO, Modria
Colin Rule is COO of Modria.com, an ODR provider based in Silicon Valley. From 2003 to 2011 he was Director of Online Dispute Resolution for eBay and PayPal. He has worked in the dispute resolution field for more than a decade as a mediator, trainer, and consultant. He is currently Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution at UMass-Amherst and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.
Colin co-founded Online Resolution, one of the first online dispute resolution (ODR) providers, in 1999 and served as its CEO (2000) and President. In 2002 Colin co-founded the Online Public Disputes Project (now eDeliberation.com) which applies ODR to multiparty, public disputes. Previously, Colin was General Manager of Mediate.com, the largest online resource for the dispute resolution field. Colin also worked for several years with the National Institute for Dispute Resolution (now ACR) in Washington, D.C. and the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, MA.
Colin has presented and trained throughout Europe and North America for organizations including the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the Department of State, the International Chamber of Commerce, and the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution. He has also lectured and taught at UMass-Amherst, Stanford, MIT, Creighton University, Southern Methodist University, the University of Ottawa, and Brandeis University.
Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business, published by Jossey-Bass in September 2002. He has contributed more than 50 articles to prestigious ADR publications such as Consensus, The Fourth R, ACResolution Magazine, and Peace Review. He currently blogs at Novojustice.com, and serves on the boards of RESOLVE and the Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center. He holds a Master’s degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in conflict resolution and technology, a graduate certificate in dispute resolution from UMass-Boston, a B.A. from Haverford College, and he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eritrea from 1995-1997.
Jin Ho Verdonschot, Justice Sector Advisor HiiL Innovating Justice
Jin Ho works as a dispute resolution technology advisor and helps courts and other justice sector organisations to create user-friendly interfaces of the justice system.
He obtained a PhD in law with a study on how we can systematically develop law as sharing rules: practical formulas, grids, tables, etc. that indicate how to concretely share value, costs, and tasks. While working on this study, Jin Ho developed several spin-off IT applications for developing and delivering sharing rules.
Jin Ho is the fonder of M-Sheria, a legal helpdesk he initiated and developed together with Kituo Cha Sheria and Space Kenya. It combines internet technology, SMS and USSD technology so that slum dwellers and other vulnerable groups get access to actionable legal information.
Jin Ho increasingly got fascinated by how technologies offer opportunities to not just replicate existing justice processes online, but to fundamentally improve them. So during the past years he primarily worked on designing and developing IT based justice applications like:
* Online court procedures that go beyond pdf-ication of existing procedures and fully utilise the opportunities of modern IT.
* Online platforms that offer a problem-solving environment where disputants can have a dialogue and has third party interventions plugged into it.
* SMS and USSD platforms for disseminating actionable legal information, delivered just in time.Justice IT applications offer great opportunities in both the developed and the developing world. Jin Ho led in access to justice innovations in partnerships in The Netherlands, Azerbaijan, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, Mali, and Canada.
7442Joseph Markowitz, Atty, Law Offices of Joseph C Markowitz
Joe Markowitz is a trial attorney and mediator practicing in Los Angeles, CA. He has vast experience with resolution of employment, intellectual property, entertainment, and other commercial disputes. He currently serves as president of the Southern California Mediation Association.
