ABA Section of Business Law

And then, on the Net . . .

By Garrett Ordower

The goal of clickNsettle.com is to get cases settled and get them settled quickly and fairly.

"We started the company eight years ago because of the concept that dispute resolution is a quicker, more efficient alternative to the court system," said Roy Israel, president and CEO of clickNsettle.com. "On average it takes 30 months in the United States to get your day in court, 1.6 percent of all cases go to verdict and $160 billion were spent on those cases last year. Why spend all that time and money so that three years from now you can settle on the steps of a courthouse? Why not do it today and save all that time and money?"

ClickNsettle.com started as National Arbitration and Mediation, and changed its name to reflect the changing direction of the company. As an offline company, clickNsettle offers 1,100 neutrals, 200 employment specialists and 200 international arbitrators. The for-profit company, based in Great Neck, N.Y., went public three years ago making it the only publicly held dispute resolution company.

With clickNsettle, all of the information, from arbitrators’ backgrounds to the determining of a meeting place, is available online. If the parties fail to check their hearing schedules, the company has a triple-notification system to ensure that everyone is at the right place at the right time.

"We are extremely tight in our coordination of cases," Israel said.

He credits that tightness as the reason why 440 different insurance companies have chosen clickNsettle as their dispute resolution company, constituting a large percentage of the company’s business.

About 1,000 lawyers took advantage of the online abilities of clickNsettle in 1999, which remains small in comparison to the approximately 10,000 firms who used the offline abilities of the company. But Israel expects those numbers to change.

"The offline aspect today is bigger than the online aspect in terms of the volume of cases," Israel said. "However, there is no question that the Internet and technology in general are going to grow in influence and affect not only law, but all business. Look at the legal industry today and imagine it without e-mails or Lexis-Nexis. Clearly technology is going to affect the industry in the future."

To that effect, clickNsettle introduced a blind-bid negotiation system online, which allows parties to enter their ideal settlement amount into the system without the other party seeing it. If the settlement amounts that the parties enter are within 30 percent of each other, the system splits the difference and settles the case. If not, the numbers remain hidden and neither party is the wiser as to what the other one wants.

Israel believes that in-person arbitration will always remain a viable part of ADR. But he still believes that the first step should be an online one.

Ordower is a freelance writer in Evanston, Ill.

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