Speakers and Programme

DAY 1: MONDAY MAY 23

08:30-09:00  Morning coffee and registration

09:00-9:30   Welcome and introduction –  Jin Ho Verdonschot, Director HiiL Rewire Justice Technology (confirmed) & Colin Rule, Founder and COO Modria (confirmed) 

9:30-10:15   Diagnosis: The need for ODR in our primary court processes – Lord Justice Fulford, Senior Presiding Judge of England and Wales (confirmed)

10:15-11.30    Short pitches of ODR in practice

• Civil Resolution Tribunal in British Columbia – Shannon Salter, Chair of the Civil Resolution Tribunal BC (confirmed)
• Employment tool “Magontslag” – Professor Evert Verhulp, University of Amsterdam (confirmed)
• Modria Resolution Centre – Chittu Nagarajan, founder (confirmed)
• Youstice – Zbynek Loebl, CEO (confirmed)
• Rewire Justice Technology empowering Rechtwijzer, My Law BC and Relate Liselotte Maas, Program director (confirmed), Sherry MacLennan, Director Legal Services Society BC (confirmed), Laura Dowson, Director of Innovation (confirmed)
• FastPortal – Rik Visser, CEO Fastportal (confirmed)

11:30-12:15    ODR, Dutch courts and the changing role of judges – Tanja Dompeling, Leading member of the KEI digitalization program (confirmed)

12:15-12:45 Fair solutions through ODR – Nancy Welsh, Professor of Law at Penn State and Chair ABA Section on Dispute Resolution (confirmed)

12:45-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:00   Integrating ODR innovations in courts – Willy Mutunga, Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court of Kenya (confirmed)

14:00-14:30 The challenges of institutional innovation – a personal account – Léonard Sellem and Jeremy Oinino, Founders of Demander Justice (confirmed)

14:30-14:45   Ethical Principles for ODR – Leah Wing, Co-director, National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (confirmed)

14:45-15:00   Coffee break

15:00-15:45   Working Groups: Models of ODR and Courts Integration

WG I: Full integration – Facilitated by Maurits Barendrecht, Research Director HiiL Innovating Justice (confirmed) & Jeff Aresty, President InternetBar.org (confirmed)

WG II: Pre-trial ODR – Facilitated by Sherry MacLennan, Director Legal Services Society BC & Richard Chilver, Digital Services Development Manager (confirmed)

WG III: ODR as competitors to the court – Facilitated by Aura Esther Vilalta, Senior lecturer at Faculty of Law Open University of Catalonia (UOC) (confirmed), Prof. Agustín Madrid Parra, University Pablo de Olavide Ctra (confirmed) & Frances Singleton, Justice Technology Advisor HiiL Rewire Justice Technology (confirmed)

WG IV: ODR platforms as a marketplace for legal and
adjudication services – Facilitated by Joyce Raby, Executive Director at Florida Justice Technology Center (confirmed) & Orna Rabinovich, Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa (confirmed)

15:45-16:00   Coffee break

16:00-16:45   ODR and the Dutch courts: making procedures work for all its users – Dory Reiling, Senior Judge and leading member of the KEI digitalization program (confirmed)

16:45-17:30   The issues to be resolved – Results of working groups
Interviewer: Maurits Barendrecht, Research Director HiiL Innovating Justice

Interviewees:

• Lord Justice Fulford, Senior Presiding Judge of England and Wales (confirmed)
• Willy Mutunga, Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court of Kenya (confirmed)
• Colin Rule, COO Modria (confirmed)
• Dory Reiling, Senior Judge and leading member of the KEI digitalization program (confirmed)
• Jim Leason, VP Court Management Solutions Thomson Reuters (confirmed)
• Judge Joyce Aluoch, First Vice President of the International Criminal Court (confirmed)

 

DAY 2: TUESDAY MAY 24

08:30-09:00 Morning coffee

09:00-09:15 Opening Day 2 – Jin Ho Verdonschot, Director HiiL Rewire Justice Technology

09:15-9:45 ODR, Future directions of ODR – Ethan Katsh, Chair National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (confirmed)

09:45-10:00 ODR, best practices and quality standards – Daniel Rainey, Chief of Staff National Mediation Board (tbc)

10:00-10:45 I. Working groups: best practices for implementation

ODR and the legal profession: enabling legal professionals to deliver more justice – Janet Martinez, Director of the Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution (confirmed)

Bending the Bar rules – Professor David Allen Larson, senior fellow at Mitchell Hamline’s Dispute Resolution Institute (confirmed)

Landlord-tenant disputes – Eiichiro Mandai, President ODR Room Network Japan (confirmed)

Timing interventions in the ODR process – Nicolas Vermeys, Associate Director Cyberjustice Laboratory University of Montreal (confirmed)

Small Claims –  Sue Prince, Associate Professor in Law University of Exeter (confirmed)

10:45-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-11:45 II. Working groups: best practices for implementation

Asylum cases – Vikki Rogers, Director of Institute of International Commercial Law Pace Law School (confirmed)

Consumer disputes – Graham Ross, Mediation Room, Pablo Cortes – professor Leicester University (all confirmed)

Divorce disputes – Laura Dowson, Relate (confirmed) and Liselotte Maas, Dutch Legal Aid Board (confirmed)

Rethinking Judicial Perceptions – Erik Boerma, Judge The Netherlands Judiciary (confirmed)

11:45-12:15 Fairness in delivering justice online – Roger Smith, OBE (confirmed)

12:15-13:15  Lunch

13:15-13:45 Making ODR happen: an executive branch perspective – Tom Wynne-Morgan, UK Ministry of Justice (confirmed)

13:45-14:15 Making ODR part of cutting edge innovation strategies of governments, H.E Al Majid, Chief Innovation Officer UAE Ministry of Justice (confirmed)

14:15-14:35 HiiL Innovating Justice approach to ODR and justice innovation – Sam Muller, CEO, HiiL Innovating Justice (confirmed)

14:35-14:50 Coffee break

14:50-15:50  Making ODR a sustainable and preferred option: Results of working groups discussed during interview:
Interviewer: Maurits Barendrecht, Research director HiiL Innovating Justice

Interviewees: 

• Chief Justice Willy Mutunga  (confirmed)
• Athaliah Lesiba Molokomme,  Attorney General of Botswana (confirmed)
• Jan Moerland, DAS (confirmed)
• Emile de Wijs, Achmea Rechtsbijstand (confirmed)
• HE Al Majid, Chief Innovation Officer UAE Ministry of Justice (confirmed)
• Sam Muller, CEO HiiL Innovating Justice (confirmed)

15:50-16:20  Closing  Jin Ho Verdonschot & Ethan Katsh (confirmed)

16:20-17:40  Networking Reception

 

Meet our keynote speakers:

WILLY MUTUNGA, Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court of Kenya. Willy Mutunga is a Kenyan lawyer, intellectual, and reform activist. He is a Senior Counsel of the Kenyan Bar and former Chair of the Law Society of Kenya. As Chief Justice, he leads major reforms of the courts and judiciary in Kenya. Willy Mutunga is also a member of the Justice Leadership Group http://justiceleaders.org/.

LORD JUSTICE FULFORD, Senior Presiding Judge of England and Wales. In simultaneously holding office at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the British High Court, Lord Justice Fulford delivered the ICC’s first ever guilty verdict in the case of Thomas Lubanga. In his current position of Senior Presiding Judge of England and Wales, he continues to work towards improving and innovating the delivery of justice.

TANJA DOMPELING, Leading member of the KEI (Quality and Innovation) digitalization program, The Netherlands Judiciary. Tanja is a judge in the Judiciary of The Netherlands. In that role, she was one of the initiators of the biggest digitisation programme of the Dutch courts in history.

COLIN RULE, Founder and COO of Modria.com. Widely recognised as one of the founding fathers of modern ODR, Colin set up the dispute resolution platforms of eBay and Paypal before founding Modria. He is based in Silicon Valley where he continues to contribute significantly to the development of ODR globally.

DORY REILING Ph.D. Mag.Iur. is a senior judge at the Amsterdam District Court. She is involved in designing the digital procedures in the civil courts in the Netherlands. She was a senior judicial reform specialist at the World Bank and IT program manager for the Netherlands judiciary. She regularly lectures on court IT at universities, judicial academies and postgraduate schools and works as an IT adviser to judiciaries around the world. She is also a co-author of the World Bank Handbook on Justice Sector Assessments. She was the acting expert for the Consultative Council of European Judges (Council of Europe) Opinion 14 on information technologies and the courts. Her 2009 book Technology for Justice, How Information Technology can Support Judicial Reform, is widely available in print, on line and as an e-book. Her publications can be found on http://www.doryreiling.com, her tweets are on http://www.twitter.com/doryontour and her Technology for Justice blog is on http://www.doryreiling.blogspot.nl.

Other Speakers:

JIN HO VERDONSCHOT, Director HiiL Rewire Justice Technology. He designed the Dutch Rechtwijzer Platform, which is the world’s first online platform for problem-soving dispute resolution of relational disputes (like divorce, landlord-tenant issues, employment issues). Jin Ho combines expertise from dispute system design, access to justice, UX/UI design, and (online) dispute resolution. He helps courts and other justice sector organisations to update and innovate their procedures and justice processes.

MAURITS BARENDRECHT, Research director, HiiL Innovating Justice. Maurits Barendrecht has lead several large scale innovation projects in the realm of justice and governance, which directly address urgent justice needs which are difficult to cope with through existing legal arrangements. One of them was Online supported procedures that integrate diagnosis, legal information, negotiation, mediation and problem-solving adjudication (Rechtwijzer 2.0).

ETHAN KATSH, Director, National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Ethan Katsh is widely recognized as the founder of the field of online dispute resolution (ODR). Along with Janet Rifkin, he conducted the eBay Pilot Project in 1999 that led to eBay’s current system that handles over sixty million disputes each year. Since then, he has published numerous articles about ODR and co-edited Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice, which received the International Institute for Conflict Resolution book award for 2012.

JAN MOERLAND, Jan is member of the Board of Directors of DAS Netherlands. He is responsible for Claims management, Underwriting, Legal management and Quality management.

SHERRY MACLENNAN, Director, Public Legal Information and Applications at the Legal Services Society in British Columbia. Sherry joined LSS as a staff lawyer in 2000, following a career in private practice in both BC and Saskatchewan. While at LSS, she has worked in a number of capacities that saw her implement the family duty counsel program and later manage intake, offices and local agents. Sherry is the Chair of the BC Public Legal Education & Information Working Group and sits on the advisory committees of two national access to justice projects, the National Self-Represented Litigant Project and the Evolving Legal Services project.

CHITTU NAGARAJAN, the co-founder of Modria.com, and Managing Director of Modria India. Chittu also founded ODRworld and ODRindia, the first Online Dispute Resolution Service Provider in India in 2004. She served as Head of the eBay and Pay Pal Community Court initiative. She has a Legal Practicing Certificate and is a trained Mediator.

JEFF ARESTY, founder and current President of Internetbar.org, Inc. which leads the technology and rule of law project, PeaceTones, for the World Justice Forum. He is a past chair of the American Bar Association Section of International Law’s Information Services, Technology, and Data Protection Committee and currently the deputy program chair.

PABLO CORTES, qualified attorney in Spain and a lecturer at the School of Law of University of Leicester in the UK. His research interests lie in the intersection ofalternative dispute resolution (ADR), online dispute resolution (ODR), consumer protection, and civil procedure. Pablo has carried out expert appointments by UNCITRAL and the European Commission.

JOYCE RABY, Executive Director at Florida Justice Tech Center. Joyce runs a technology consulting practice helping non-profits use all kinds of technology to effectively further their missions.

SHANNON SALTER, Chair of the Civil Resolution Tribunal. Shannon grounds her leadership of the Civil Resolution Tribunal in her longstanding commitment to access to justice, particularly in the context of administrative tribunals. An active provider of pro bono legal advice and representation through her career, Shannon is also adjunct professor of administrative law at the UBC Faculty of Law, a commissioner of the Financial Institutions Commission and vice president of the British Columbia Council of Administrative Tribunals.

NICOLAS VERMEYS, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Montreal , co-director of the M.Sc. eCommerce UdeM-HEC and deputy director of Cyberjustice Laboratory .

ORNA RABINOVIC-EINY, assistant professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa. Her areas of expertise are alternative dispute resolution, online dispute resolution, and civil procedure, with research focusing on the relationship between formal and informal justice systems, dispute system design and the impact of technology on dispute resolution.

ZBYNEK LOEBL, CEO of Youstice. Founded Youstice as a globally available tool for efficient resolving shopping issues. His experience with alternative dispute resolutions originates from managing the development of European ADR Centre at the Czech Arbitration Court. He specialises in the field of Internet law and legal aspects of ICT and technology projects and is an expert in online dispute resolution.

AURA ESTHER VILALTA, senior lecturer at Faculty of Law, Open University of Catalonia (UOC), associate lecturer at Ramon Llull University (ESADE) and researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Esther teaches civil Law, private international and comparative Law, and ADR/ODR at the Master of Information Society.

DAVID LARSON, Professor of Law at the Hamline University School of Law, a Senior Fellow at Hamline’s Dispute Resolution Institute, and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He developed and teaches a full semester Cyber Skills and Dispute Resolution course and also teaches Arbitration, Employment Discrimination Law, Employment Law, Labor Law, and Administrative Law. He was the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the “Journal of Alternative Dispute Resolution in Employment”.

GRAHAM ROSS, Founder and President of TheMediationRoom.com. Graham is the author of legal application software (accounts and time recording) and the founder of LAWTEL, the popular web-based legal information update service. He co-founded the first ODR service in the UK, WeCanSettle, and designed the blind bidding software at the heart of the system.

JANET MARTINEZ, Director of the Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution and Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, where she teaches advanced negotiation, dispute system design and alternative dispute resolution law & policy. Martinez is also a Senior Advisor with LaxSebenius –The Negotiation Group, in Massachusetts.

EIICHIRO MANDAI, CEO of the ORD Room Network INC. After establishing ODR Room Network, Eiichiro served in mainly research and evangelistic part of the ODR. He contributed to the project “ICA-Net”, which is now permanent entity “CCJ”, complaint handling platform for cross-border dispute on e-commerce.

LISELOTTE MAAS works as administrator in Utrecht. She oversees the debt restructuring program after it was handed down by the court. For this, she has also worked as a debt counsellor in the extrajudicial process. She also provides advice and training in the field of debt management and budget, both to professionals and to organizations and companies.

SUE PRINCE, Associate Professor in Law, University of Exeter. Sue’s research interests focus on access to justice in the civil courts looking particularly at the role of court-based mediation. She conducted the first study of small claims mediation in England and Wales for the Civil Justice Council in 2004. Sue has also conducted research into fast track and multi-track mediation at Exeter and Guildford County Courts and on the small claims mediation scheme at Exeter County Court, commissioned by the Ministry of Justice.

VIKKI ROGERS, the Director of the IICL and Assistant Dean of Online Programs at Pace Law School. Her interest/work focuses on the promotion of the commercial rule of law and access to justice by leveraging technological innovation to (1) provide high-quality educational opportunities and online legal resources in international commercial law and dispute resolution; and (2) facilitate the development of online dispute prevention, management and resolution systems.

Dr ATHALIA MOLOKOMME is Botswana’s first female attorney general and a widely respected scholar. She has authored an extensive list of research projects and publications that deal in the fields of family law, women and law, customary law and employment law. Over the last 20 years, Dr Molokomme has been a regular advocate for women’s rights at conferences, workshops and seminars in Botswana and abroad. She has served on many boards to help meet the same end, drawing from her years as a university lecturer, judge and attorney general. Dr Athalia Molokomme is also a member of the Justice Leadership Group http://justiceleaders.org/.

ERIK BOERMA, Judge, The Netherlands Judiciary. Head of the Insolvency Team of the court of Breda untill july 2012, Board member Recofa (National Consultation insolvency judges), Project Digital Insolvency Unit (until 1-1-2013), Project Digital submission Money Claims District (until 1-1-2014).

EVERT VERHULP chairs the board of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies. On January 1th 2007 he was appointed as scientific director of the Hugo Sinzheimer Institute . In 2008/2009 Verhulp chaired an independent research mission to the Kyrgyz Republic at the request of the International Labour Organisation. Verhulp is a member of several editorial staffs and member of several independent committees, such as the Committee on integrity of the civil servants.

RICHARD CHILVER is a digital services manager at Relate, the UK Legal Aid Board. Within his role he is managing the Relate Rechtwijzer project and is in charge of everything from oversight of the development and planning of the platform to helping clients through the process itself.

NANCY WELSH, Professor of Law at the Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania State University. Nancy Welsh is a leading scholar in the field of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) with research and writing focusing primarily on negotiation and court-connected and agency-connected mediation. She has examined the procedural justice offered by these processes, their potential to resolve non-legal as well as legal issues, and the effect that the courts and institutionalized “alternative” processes have had on each other.

LAURA DOWSON works for Relate and acts as a direct conduit between the organisation and the Ministry of Justice in the UK. She is responsible for bringing together the Relate Rechtwijzer platform and pushing its global implementation by the UK government.

JIM LEASON, VP and Head of Court Solutions, UK & Ireland Legal, Thomson Reuters. Jim is responsible for ensuring that Thomson Reuters is organised to bid for, deliver and support courts and tribunal management solutions in the UK, Ireland and Europe. He is also responsible for the C-Track system, which for over a decade has been a huge success, providing case management solutions that have been specifically designed to capture, track, process and report on court information.

RIK VISSER runs Fastportal along with co-founders Dylan Davies (25, Co-CMO / COO), Wim Dijksterhuis (25, Co-CMO / COO) and Theodor Diaconu (Romania, 25 CTO). They make self-service customer portals via a white label, SaaS model for service providers, such as lawyers, accountants and notaries. Currently they focus more particularly on auditors. “We take the whole process of tax out of your hands, as do the tax consultant a workflow.

DANIEL RAINEY is the Chief of Staff for the National Mediation Board (NMB), the US government agency charged with dispute resolution in the airline and railroad industries in the United States. While at the NMB he has guided their ADR programs into a leading role in online dispute resolution, integrating technology into all of the agency’s mission areas and winning the National Archivist’s award for managing electronic records. He is a member of the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR), and past Chair of the ACR ODR Section.

ROGER SMITH is an expert in domestic and international aspects of legal aid, human rights and access to justice. He writes regularly in the specialist legal press in England and Wales, with regular op-ed pieces in the Law Society Gazette and theNew Law Journal. Roger is a visiting professor of law at London South Bank University and an honorary professor at the University of Kent. He is a solicitor and has been director of the Legal Action Group, JUSTICE and West Hampstead Community Law Centre.

LEAH WING serves on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst where her research and teaching apply critical theory to ODR, mediation, and truth recovery and reconciliation in colonized and postcolonial societies. She has been a mediator since 1983 and trainer for educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profits since 1985, serving on the Board of Directors of the Association of Conflict Resolution from 2002-6.

SAM MULLER is the founding director of HiiL Innovating Justice. An international lawyer by training, he now works on justice strategy and innovation, connecting knowledge about needs and what works with justice change processes that make a difference. The clients he has worked for include governments, international businesses and leading civil society organisations.

JOYCE ALUOCH is a Judge of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. She is a lawyer and former judge of the High Court of Kenya. She is the First Chairperson of the Committee of African Union Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and was the Vice-Chairperson of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child from 2003 to 2009. She has also served as the inaugural head of the family division of the Kenyan High Court and a member of the Court of Appeal.

H.E AL MAJID is the Assistant Undersecretary and the Chief Innovation Office. He is responsible for formulating strategies and driving the Ministry Of Justice in its modernization efforts to become the first in smart eJustice governance in the world. Prior to his current appointment Mr. Al-Majid has held several key posts. In his role as the Federal eGovernment Director, he has spearheaded several major eGovernment projects. In the Commercial Sector, as Programme Manager of Microsoft MENA he was instrumental in several new developments and white papers for products for the ME market.

LEONARD SELLEM, Managing Director at Demander Justice and Action Civile. Demander Justice is an online platform to file a complaint, avoiding costly lawyers’ fees.

JEREMY OININO, President, ActionCivile.com and DemanderJustice.com. A graduate of HEC and Telecom Paris, 10 years of experience in the field of Internet and new technologies, both as a start-up manager and investor.

TOM WYNNE-MORGAN is the product manager for the UK Ministry of Justice. His experience there includes launching the beta web app for handling Parliamentary Questions within the Ministry of Justice. He is also a Director of Design Company Wynners Limited and co-founder of AlterFutures, a meetup group and collective for those interested in speculative design and alternative futures.

EMILE DE WIJS is a legal counsel and a secretary supervisory board to Achmea. He focuses on providing preemptive legal and strategic support on legal aid-, damage- and liability- insurance products, claims handling, legal proceedings, legal knowledge management, insurance fraud and compliance and legal business strategies.