Can crowd arbitration do justice? It depends, of course, on the definition of justice. According to H.L.A. Hart inThe Concept of Law, justice means having like cases being treated alike. H.L.A. HART, THE CONCEPT OF LAW (2nd ed., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994), Ch. VII. Only relevant differences should be considered when reaching a different result from another case. Id. Under this definition, crowd arbitration’s justness depends on the consistency of the community in similar cases. Because...
Do the benefits of time and cost savings make crowd arbitration a less reliable means of dispute resolution? In fact, the result is the opposite–having more people participate is actually likely to make the dispute resolution far more reliable and predictable than any other method. This reliability comes from the power of numbers. Statistically, averaging a larger sample provides a more accurate reflection of the community’s reasoning and values. Put another way, crowd arbitration eliminates...
Crowdsourcing is a potential source of substantial benefits to dispute resolution. The main reason for these benefits is that crowdsourcing easily pools together the views of a large amount of people, far more than could be collected into a single room for arbitration or a courtroom. By moving dispute resolution into the virtual space, the physical limitations of dispute resolution are eliminated. As experiments with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowd intelligence platform show, crowdsourcing can be extremely...
The statistics for startup success can be grim. Approximately 75 percent of all startups fail, and about 90 percent of all products fail. Yet every day, new entrepreneurs dream up products and services and jump into the startup fray.
What's really tripping up the ones who barely make it out of the starting gate? The economy, of course, doesn't make things easy. But perhaps there's something much closer to home that increases the challenge.
Our brains are powerful processing tools, but just like...
Affirming the District Court's judgment compelling arbitration, the Fifth Circuit overrules prior precedent regarding non-signatories and the enforcement of arbitration agreements under the Federal Arbitration Act. Whereas previous Circuit precedent had applied Federal common law to resolve issues involving non-signatories under the FAA, this opinion holds that state law should instead control analysis of such issues. The Court's opinion recognizes that its prior decisions applying Federal...
Have you heard about microaggressions? As Shipman & Goodwin partner Daniel Schwartz explains on the Connecticut Employment Law Blog, the term is quickly becoming the word du jour, especially on college campuses.
While not the language of traditional racism, he says microaggressions are quiet, often unintended slights, racist or sexist, that make a person feel underestimated on the basis of their color or gender. An example might be something as simple as someone commenting about a Latino’s...
Brown Rudnick is rescinding offers to 10 out of 23 associates who were scheduled to join the firm in the fall.
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Brown Rudnick cites declining client demand for first-year associates and relatively flat demand for legal services, though overall financial performance has been strong. The firm has added business and legal staff, but most of the growth has been in London, Orange County and Paris. “Market conditions have remained challenging,” the firm says.
As courts are working harder than ever and with more limited resources, more cases are being resolved short of trial or tried by courts without juries. Indeed, we may be entering an era of the vanishing jury trial.1 Los Angeles Superior Court statistics indicate that the number of jury trials in general jurisdiction civil cases (over $25,000) has been shrinking during the past decade.2Last year, jury trials in these cases were down more than 25 percent from 10 years ago. Meanwhile, nonjury trials...