Law Commons^™

When “Yes” May Actually Mean “No”: Rethinking Informed Consent To Adr Processes, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

It is time for us to rethink how to achieve meaningful party consent to ADR processes such as mediation and arbitration. I, along with my colleagues Professors Jeff Sovern, Paul F. Kirgis and Yuxiang Liu, recently contributed to the growing body of research finding that a party’s consent to use an ADR process rather than utilizing a court to resolve the dispute is too often neither informed nor consensual. In our empirical study “’Whimsy Little Contracts’ With Unexpected Consequences: An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Understanding of Arbitration Agreements,” we found a paucity of consumer awareness and understanding of arbitration …

A Post-Conference Reflection On Separate Ethical Aspirations For Adr's Not-So-Separate Practitioners, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

At "The Lawyer's Duties and Responsibilities in Dispute Resolution" Symposium at South Texas College of Law, Oct. 25, 1996, a central topic of discussion was ADR's ethical separateness. There was a shared sense that ADR providers and practitioners confront a range of ethical issues that differ from those that confront non-ADR lawyers. On this view, because rules of professional responsibility are geared toward more adversarial forms of legal practice, they at best provide no answers and may provide wrong answers to ethical questions that arise in ADR. One solution would be to create new, separate, "role-specific" ethics rules for ADR …