One of ADR Notable’s users in Northern Ireland recently brought an eye-opening article to our attention. Published in August 2023 by the Labour Relations Agency of Northern Ireland, it reports that the total annual cost of workplace conflict to employers in that country works out, on average, to £1,085 per employee. Now, let’s assume that the dynamics are comparable in the United States. Using full-time, non-farm employment numbers and currency exchange rates for 2019 (the year in which the Northern Ireland survey data was collected) we end up with a very rough extrapolation of a staggering $1 ..read more

United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2023 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary focuses on the role of technology in the courts. It provides a fascinating history of the gradual adoption of technology by the judiciary. As a starting point, he notes the placement of white goose quill pens at counsel table in the Supreme Court, a practice which continues today, providing a nice memento for counsel appearing before the court and a nod to tradition. His report marches through time identifying milestones along the way, such as the use of typewriters, dictaphones, and the prov ..read more

Love it or hate it – I sure feel both ways – technology is going to be an increasing part of our lives in the future. And that goes double for dispute resolution practitioners. Dispute resolution is fundamentally about communication, and technological developments are rapidly revolutionizing how we communicate. I became more conscious of the role of technology in how practitioners actually work when I developed the Real Practice Systems Project Menu of Mediation Checklists. Read more about the Lande Checklists embedded in ADR Notable…. This post uses those checklists to illustrate practitioner ..read more

Texas-based Yes Mediate has selected ADR Notable as its case management platform for out-of-network care reimbursement disputes between health care providers and insurance companies under the federal No Surprises Act. The No Surprises Act dispute resolution process implemented in April 2022 protects patients covered by private health insurance plans from surprise medical bills. This occurs when a patient receives care from a provider outside their plan’s network and is billed for the difference between the provider’s charges and what their insurance covers. To resolve such payment disputes, t ..read more

Confused about whether AI is good or bad? You’re not alone, as you can see from these quotes taken from New York Times articles appearing on the same day.  But a deeper dive can show how AI can be a useful catalyst to creative thinking for dispute resolution professionals. In the first article, Jason Farago, the Times culture critic, does an exceptional job of putting the fears of technology into a smaller box. He focuses on the uses of AI in art and music, and his perspective also informs those fearful of technology in the very human environment of conflict resolution. With the ear and ..read more

When I saw a recent podcast by Dr. Sanjay Gupta about messiness I thought immediately of my own work environment.  I realized that today we all have two desktops -one physical and one in our computer. In my case, my physical desktop is in fact a mess but my computer desktop and files are very well organized. With this in mind, I listened to the Gupta podcast and then did a little more research on the impact on our work lives of being messy. The research is succinctly summed up in a Harvard Business Review article as “When our space is a mess, so are we.”  Some effects of messiness ar ..read more

“We could have never done that by ourselves. We wouldn’t have known how.” A story appearing in the New York Times about the town of Silverton, Colorado and the value that mediators bring to bear on communities caught my eye.  I began my career in the practice of law in Colorado and visited Silverton in 1984 on a motorcycle trip shortly after taking the bar exam. My visit to Silverton is particularly memorable because of how I got there. I had headed southwest out of Denver and got down to Creede, Colorado but wanted to turn west. I showed a couple of old guys in a bar a map, and asked h ..read more

In the quaint town of Rosemead, California, the Johnson family, a diverse group of nearly 30 relatives including in-laws, aunts, uncles, and cousins, gathered to celebrate their Thanksgiving at a well-known local restaurant. The festive atmosphere was set with an array of traditional dishes, including scrumptious desserts of both pumpkin and pecan pies served a la mode. Excuse me? When dessert was served, Mr. Johnson, the family patriarch, requested dessert forks for the pie a la mode. To his surprise and dismay, the waiter, with utmost politeness, declined his request, citing a peculiar Rosem ..read more

Gary Doernhoefer, the founder and managing member of ADR Notable, suggested that I produce this set of checklists. ADR Notable is an app providing case management software to help mediators handle case intake, bill clients, manage client documents, develop checklists and task reminders, take notes, build documents, and manage client relationships generally. Gary recognized that our respective work complements each other’s. In recent years, I have written a series of publications leading to what I call the Real Practice Systems Project. I became dissatisfied with traditional dispute resolution ..read more

The National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR) CyberWeek conference for 2023 launched on Monday. ADR Notable was invited to present its product last year as an introduction to the marketplace. We were invited back this year, but instead of doing a simple product demo a second time, we focused the conversation on how technology service providers go about adding features to an existing software product.   How do new features get added to a software platform? Essentially, this starts with the identification of the feature or service that you want to add say, for insta ..read more