Innovation in ODR (video extract)

Civil Justice Council

Watch Jin Ho Verdonschot, justice technology architect, discuss IT related developments in ODR.

This clip lasts just over 3 minutes. The full audio version of the interview can be streamed on the judiciary site or it can be downloaded from The Internet Archive.

Transcript

Aled: All right, and you’ve developed your own platform, right?

Jin Ho: Yes. It’s called the Rechtwijzer 2.0 platform and you can call it an end to end district resolution platform which specifically focuses on supporting and empowering people who experienced relational disputes. So it could be a divorce issue, landlord/tenant issue, employment issue, I call them relational disputes to distinguish them from transactional disputes. For the small claims, low value, high-volume type of institutes generally involving a less emotional dimension to them. It’s also typically less interest based, or need for interest based dispute resolution probably.

This Rechtwijzer 2.0 platform, we developed this at HiiL, and for us the development started us, basically, on a journey that was led by a colleague of mine, Corry van Zeeland, who started developing the Rechtwijzer 1.0 platform as of 2006 together with our main partner, the Dutch Legal Aid Board. What this Rechtwijzer 1.0 platform does is it provided an interactive web-based platform to people where people could diagnose their legal problems. So they could understand what exactly the nature of the problem that they experienced was, from a more legal perspective and also would provide triage.

It would provide people the different options that they would have to take action towards resolution. This could be referring them to mediators. Also explaining what the pros and cons of mediation were, what they could expect from the mediation process, or lawyers or notary public, that type of triage. That was part of it.

What we also did in the Rechtwijzer 1.0 platform was, we had some diagnostic tests that measured the level of self-efficacy of people, so that we could give them a © MediatorAcademy.com 2014 All Rights Reserved recommendation based on that. Whether taking action themselves would seem an appropriate action for them, or whether it would be a good idea for them to hire a professional from the very beginning.

Lastly, it also provided some self-help tools like template letters that they could use to send to the other party, or document checklists that they could use to prepare themselves, or communication tips and tricks that they could use to communicate with the other party. That’s where it started. We launched that in 2006, and we saw several things happen at a certain stage.