From ADRhub.com member: I am a finalist for the Innovating Justice Award sponsored by the International Hague.  My idea shows the dramatic cost and time savings when comparing mediation/ADR to litigation in the private and public sectors.  To vote for my idea please visit:                            http://lnkd.in/baK4vyb .  Thanks for your help!     

A Total Cost of Ownership approach

It was decided to answer the general statement more precisely that mediation and ADR saves time and money for the participants when compared to courtroom litigation. According to Juripax: “Mediation costs 90% less than litigation costs….for every 14 US dollars invested in ombudsman services, an organisation saves 100$ on conflict management costs.”

The assertions about cost and time savings were too vague and general for my satisfaction. In business, decision makers evaluate sales proposals and initiatives based on the Return on Investment and financial evaluation criteria. A methodology was developed based on a business career in IT sales to determine a precise Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model so that disputants would clearly see the advantages of ADR vs. appearing in court with the supervising judge, attendant lawyers, courtroom staff and overhead.

The additional value of expressing one’s position in the presence of the opposing party is another understated and undervalued benefit of ADR.  The goal was to establish an economic threshold for a judge to determine if a case was better suited for ADR or litigation based on the projected savings in time and money.

There are several target audiences ranked by priority:

• The State Governor needs to endorse and encourage mediation as the first choice for settlement of disputes rather than the conventional recourse of court litigation. The State of Michigan needs to save money, and this is an area that will save the state millions of dollars, as well as relieve taxpayers of the burden of allocating their taxes toward outdated and inefficient programs. NB: I am applying political pressure to influence the Governor of Michigan through my elected representatives in the state legislature to throw his full support behind mediation. The Governor needs to mandate rather than suggest mediation..
• The judges will recommend mediation over court litigation once the Governor backs the ADR initiative with the full weight of his office. The judges then become implementors of the move toward mediation in most cases vs. court litigation. The judges can use my metrics to see the cost and time savings of mediation vs. litigation upfront as he evaluates each case.
• The corporate CFO, COO, and CEO will be my targets in the business marketplace.

My initial idea was to develop a dashboard or software for the judge or court administrator to input the data to produce the metrics that would help him to determine if the case should go to ADR or the courts. I looked for a ratio of 3 or 4 to one costs when comparing known litigation expenses vs. the projected ADR expenses for similar or like cases to make my point more conclusively that ADR saves money and consequently time.