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A lot of people either dont understand the systems or dont want to use them.
Legal aid advocates also worry that the systems deepen imbalances of power between some parties.
The Markup found similar issues elsewhere.
Despite these challenges, online dispute resolution is far from a dying idea.
Some courts have declared online dispute resolution a success.
The court system is viewing these processes and viewing technology with greater legitimacy.
How does it work?
Modria is an eBay and PayPal spin-off that Tyler Technologies purchased in 2017.
The systems vary by court and case pop in, but they tend to follow a general procedure.
The parties then move to a chatroom-like setting where they can negotiate back and forth.
What kinds of cases are handled this way?
In Delaware, its for eviction disputes.
But some courts have also set up online dispute resolution for very niche cases.
Has online dispute resolution been successful?
Its results are often held up in academic research and industry literature as an example of the technologys promise.
But that success has not been universal.
Other jurisdictions have experienced similar accessibility problems.
Most eligible cases in Michigan, for instance, never make it to online dispute resolution.
Thats an extremely high number.
When both parties register, about 54 percent of cases end in settlements, according to Hilliker.
Thats often because neither the plaintiff nor the court has an accurate email address for the party being sued.
Californias Stanislaus County Superior Court launched online dispute resolution for small claims in July 2021.
The auditors described the systemwhich cost $150,000 per year, according tocontractsas ineffective and inefficient.
New Mexicosuspendedits online dispute resolution system in July 2021 so that it could conduct the audit.
ODR offered another opportunity for the parties to attempt to fix the money dispute.
Floridas experiments with online dispute resolution have been a microcosm of the broader, national experience.
But when the state piloted online dispute resolution in six other courts, theresults were far different.
Three withdrew because of technical issues with the systems.
A fourth launched its system, but no one signed up to use it.
We were big proponents of ODR, and I honestly thought it would really take hold, he said.
Because we werent able to pass that cost on to the user, we werent able to sustain it.
Is online dispute resolution the future?
In 2016, only one court in the countryOhios Franklin County Municipal Courthad an ODR system.
ODR was basically a private sector, out-of-court kind of process for 10 to 15 years.
Not only now is it widespread, but nobodys necessarily claiming we should go back.
This article wasoriginally published on The Markupand was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
