Never Say Never
Civil disputes will never be resolved online! That’s what everyone said until March 19, 2020. And then the whole world as we knew it changed. When COVID started spreading in NYC everything started shutting down and we moved into a hard lockdown. No one in the US had ever experienced a pandemic. There was nothing to compare it to in our personal experiences. Was it going to be like a bad flu season? Would it last more than 3 weeks? Could it possibly go on longer than that? No one knew. So every gathering that had always been in person, whether personal, professional, artistic, exercise, sports, news, politics, every event went digital seemingly overnight, and that included conflict resolution and mediation.
Suddenly the internet became the medium of choice for alternative dispute resolution. We all learned how to show up on screen, turn our cameras on and off, change our names, mute and unmute ourselves, get into and out of breakout rooms and screenshare important documents, and mediation entered the digital age.
The impact was stunning. Only a year before, the Chief Judge in New York had announced that all lawsuits had to submit to alternative dispute resolution before they could go forward in the courts. This meant that every court in the state had to set up a roster of volunteer mediators that these lawsuits could be funneled to for 90-minute pro bono mediation sessions before the cases could proceed through the normal litigation process. The timing seemed prescient: when the COVID lockdown started in New York alternative dispute resolution was already a key tool for moving the court system’s caseload forward. When it all went digital, it was just a matter of shifting the process to what has become the universally familiar ZOOM platform.
This turned out to be a great endorsement of the value of mediation by the court system and a great way to raise the visibility of mediation as a conflict resolution process.
For private mediators these cases offered a great opportunity to hone skills and establish your reputation in addition to offering a public service. It remains to be seen whether mediation will become the dispute resolution method of choice going forward.