Time for a sheriff in town? Governance for the ODR field

Cyberweek 2016 - Time for a sheriff in town? Governance for the ODR... from Werner Institute on Vimeo.

Program’s Description:

As ODR grows and gains traction, it increasingly receives attention from professional associations and industry leaders in mainstream ADR.  More recently, it has begun to receive recognition from sources outside of this field – in both the public and private sectors. As ODR develops, this attention from external sources will undoubtedly focus on questions of quality, ethics, practitioner training, service provider qualifications, and monitoring. These questions – already beginning to be heard from within the field – derive, in essence, from one shared overall question, that of appropriate governance for the ODR field.

In this webinar we will explain what we mean when we discuss a field’s governance and make the case that the field itself should investigate issues of its own governance. We explore and explain the current “low-to-no” state of governance in ODR – and the developments that are likely should the field fail to actively address this issue. We discuss the costs of no governance, and the potential costs and disadvantages of employing a higher-governance model. We ask whether ODR can, indeed, be governed at all, and illustrate why – addressing ODR governance is a very complex venture, in terms of the web of factors to be addressed – no matter how beneficial internal governance may be.

Should ODR adopt any particular form of governance, and how should it do so? We invite you to join us, and share your own views on this question. The time is ripe for field-wide conversations on governance, and we hope that this webinar – together with other webinars at Cyberweek 2016 that focus on other governance related issues such as ethics – serve to catalyze these conversations.

Presenters’ Bio:

Noam Ebner is a professor at the Werner Institute, at Creighton University’s School of Law.  Originally from New York, Noam has lived in Israel for many years, dividing his time between his home in Jerusalem, and his teaching, training and consulting activities in the U.S and abroad. He currently resides outside of Jacksonville, Florida.

Before joining the faculty at Creighton, Noam has had over a dozen years of experience teaching at universities around the world – in Israel, Turkey, Costa Rica and elsewhere. He was one of the first educators to promote and develop online teaching in the area of negotiation and dispute resolution. Formerly chair of the Werner Institute’s graduate program in negotiation and dispute resolution, Noam has taught dozens of courses online, and spearheaded curriculum and pedagogical development for an online masters degree program. Noam has consulted to programs and universities with regards to online learning, and he has coached dozens of negotiation and conflict teachers, from all over the world, in their transition to online teaching.  His most recent adventure combining international education and online teaching involved designing and teaching a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on negotiation, with over 2000 students enrolling from 87 countries.

Noam has practiced as an attorney, negotiator, and mediator at his own Jerusalem-based firm. He has trained mediators for the Israeli court system and has played key roles in a number of community mediation programs. He has conducted hundreds of workshops on negotiation and conflict resolution for a broad range of private sector industries, governmental agencies, NGOs, universities and non-profits.  Noam has authored many articles and book chapters on his research interests of negotiation pedagogy, trust and its role in dispute resolution, and negotiation and mediation processes conducted online, which are available for reading at http://ssrn.com/author=425153. He is co-editor of Assessing Our Students, Assessing Ourselves; Vol.3 in The Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Project (2012, DRI Press).

Professor John Zeleznikow is the Director of the Laboratory for Decision Support and Dispute Management at Victoria University.  

He is an internationally recognised expert with over 40 years research experience including the last 20 years working on negotiation decision support and machine learning in law.  This is evidenced by the publication of 3 books, 75 refereed journal articles (including the Harvard Negotiation Law Review and Monash University Law Review) and 150 refereed conference articles, receiving over 7 million Australian dollars in competitive research grants, significant international collaboration and industry funding, supervised 15 PHD students to completion and conducted over twenty radio and television appearances.  In November 2005, he won his heat of the ABC New Inventors program for his negotiation support system Family_Winner which enhances negotiation in Australian family disputes.

He has worked in the university sector for 44 years, with extended experience in USA, France, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Poland and Israel.  He has also worked with Victoria Legal Aid, Relationships Australia and the New Zealand government.

He has appeared in the Economist, Boston Globe, London Daily Telegraph, Times of London, CNN and El Periodico in Barcelona.

His expertise is in: Negotiation, Mediation, Alternative Dispute Resolution and Online Dispute Resolution.  He currently teaches Alternative Dispute Resolution and Research methods. He is a pioneer in the use of Machine Learning and Law – his Split Up system showed how neural networks can be used in the distribution of Australian marital property. His book, Lodder, A. and Zeleznikow, J.  2010.  Enhanced Dispute Resolution through the use of Information Technology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom is a primer on online dispute resolution whilst Ebner, Noam and Zeleznikow, John (2016), “No Sheriff in Town: Governance for the ODR Field” To appear in Negotiation Journal  investigates governance in the ODR sphere.

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