In Financier Worldwide: Mediation, AI, Technology and Access to Justice in the Modern World of ADR

Partner Jane Colston and trainee solicitor Bethany Williams co-wrote a chapter for Financier Worldwide Magazine’s 2024 edition of “Managing & Resolving Commercial Disputes.”

The chapter, entitled “Mediation, AI, Technology and Access to Justice in the Modern World of Dispute Resolution,” examines the opportunities and challenges faced by litigants seeking to resolve disputes via alternative dispute resolution (ADR).

The future of dispute resolution is outside of the courtroom and will be increasingly digital, including the use of mediation and artificial intelligence, they wrote.

While mediation is already used as an ADR, in the future, that may be combined with AI, they noted.

“Much has been made of the impact that AI will have on the legal industry of the future,” they wrote. “But AI is in fact a business today, with a wide range of practice areas using (large language models) LLMs and (natural language processing) NLP to remain competitive. Therefore the pertinent query is what is the eventual role of AI in mediation: as the mediator itself, or as a tool to assist a human mediator? Maybe, over time, both.”

Such as is used in the U.K.’s National Health Service website, a potential solution for the limited supply of mediators could be to use an AI mediation service as a fist point of contact when simple claims are brought to mediation, they wrote.

“A digital mediator would require improved confidence, not only in mediation as an effective method of dispute resolution for small claims, but also greater public confidence in the technology as a replacement ‘person’ to mediate, not least to ensure confidential data is preserved,” they added. “[A]s parties become more aware of the opportunities technology offers to resolve disputes in a cost effective and fair manner, lawyers must be agile and respond to the need for ADR.”

Read the full article here.