"The Future of Justice" - University of Leicester IT Law Society

Honoured to be invited to present the keynote speech at the 'Future of Justice' conference held by the Information Technology Law Society at the University of Leicester on the 22nd October 2014. The emphasis , of course, was on Online Dispute Resolution. A great credit to the organisers that they were able to attract Colin Rule, COO and Founder of the leading ODR company, Modria (www.modria.com) and the original Head of ODR at eBay and PayPal, the man who designed and ran the systems for eBay that have resolved over 60 million consumer disputes to date, to attend in person. Other speakers included Adrian Lally Head of Information and International Policy at the Financial Ombudsman Service, Dr Pablo Cortes, a leading academic on ODR, Rado Bonk, of Youstice (www.youstice.com) , and Poonam Bhari, Barrister and Chair of the Legal Action Group.

Congratulations to go to Nishal Patel and Pranav Khemka for organising the event. I was very impressed that instead of just taking the obvious step of inviting leading experts in the subject, it was a brilliant decision to invite also Poonam, someone with no direct experience or knowledge of ODR, but who was able to identify the potential role of ODR in broadening access to justice (a major issue for the Legal Action Group) and raise the challenge of the potential 'loss', that might be brought about by the application of technology, of the human element in dispute resolution. This led to significant debate for t