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LEGAL REPORT: ADR The new frontier BY ROBERT TODD T he Université de Montréal law fac- ulty's Centre de recherche en droit public drew the ire of lawyers across the globe in 1996 when it launched the CyberTribunal project. The ground- breaking venture was the first to offer consumers an exclusively online media- tion and arbitration platform to settle disputes with online vendors. Many law- yers were appalled by the brazen experi- ment in managing disputes between par- ties that would never come face to face and, perhaps more to the point, not pay counsel to help generate a settlement. Yet the project proved successful, helping solve a number of disputes before wrapping up in 1999. Internet-based dis- pute resolution continued to gain steam in 2000 when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) certified ODR provider eReso- lution to hear domain-name disputes. In an initial two-year period, that system helped settle over 500 conflicts involving parties from dozens of countries. At the same time, the mammoth online auc- tion site eBay turned to another ODR provider, SquareTrade, to help sort out disputes involving its customers. It went on to help resolve over a million disputes in five years. Companies soon popped up in Canada to cash in on the ODR boom. To the dismay of this country's online dispute resolution faithful, however, each one eventually flamed out. Experts say the failure was due in part to the high startup costs at that time for an ODR sys- tem (hundreds of thousands of dollars, versus about $20,000 now) and overly complex systems that kept users away. At the same time, while governments and companies across the globe have stream- lined high-volume, minor disputes with ODR, not a single Canadian jurisdiction has embraced it. That could soon change. It appears online dispute resolution is headed for a comeback in 2010, with one provincial government hoping to roll out a pilot project for its Small Claims Court, and at least one new online negotiation system was set to be released this past summer. There is plenty of reason to believe Canadians can solve many of their dis- putes solely — or primarily — on the Internet. It has certainly worked else- where. CyberSettle Inc., an ODR company based in Old Greenwich, Conn., is per- haps the most prominent provider in the world. It holds patent rights to what it describes as an "automated, online, dou- ble-blind bid dispute resolution system." The system helps users quickly match offers with demands, around the clock. If parties fail to come to a mutually agreed settlement, CyberSettle makes available a telephone facilitator to mediate. The company says it has managed over 200,000 transactions and facilitated more than $1.6 billion in settlements in www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com SEPTEMBER 2010 39 The second coming, so to speak, of online dispute resolution is upon us. JUAN CARLOS SOLON