ODR- Online Dispute Resolution- Is this the future of dispute settlement?

During the May’ 2020 lockdown when I was whiling away my time in my village in Jharkhand, I received a call from the Legal Head of one of the top life insurance companies from India with a question. Can your law firm help me in settling 6000 disputes (basically claim settlement disputes) spread across the country? Basically, what he wanted was that not to go to court and fight litigation but settle the dispute outside the court with the claimants and pay whatever could amicably be decided between the parties thus helping both the company and the clients. I needed some time to get back to him as it was logistically not possible to manage all the disputes in all the locations. We had few discussions here and there to thrash out the modalities of conducting the settlement processes. The biggest question that came in front of us was the cost of conducting the settlement process as it has to be conducted pan India. Since, it was the lockdown period and almost everything had gone online so, quite automatically we agreed that an online mode of conducting the meeting can be thought of.

During my stint as practicing lawyer, for almost every case my first approach towards a case is to convince a client to look for an alternative way to resolve the legal conflict without going to the court. There have been many instances wherein I have helped the parties to come to the table and negotiate the terms and settle the disputes and thus bring down the acrimony and negativity around all of us. Doing all this has time and again proven that there is always hope and positivity even in most negative aspects of life. ............ To read further please go to the following link where the article has been published https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/odr-online-dispute-resolution-future-settlement-shandilya