Online Dispute Resolution Platform Yields Promising Results for Family Law Cases
Parties in Ottawa County, Mich. with post-judgment family law cases who used an online platform for custody, parenting time or child support matters were four times more likely to reach agreement, a new University of California, Davis study found. In cases involving child support, parties using the online platform reached resolution nearly twice as fast as those who did not.
Moreover, the Michigan program’s use rate was higher than in other online dispute resolution (ODR) programs, and parties generally found the platform easy to use and ranked their experiences highly in terms of procedural justice.
UC Davis School of Law Director of Lawyering Skills and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law Donna Shestowsky evaluated the Michigan ODR program as part of a larger, groundbreaking empirical study launched in 2019 to examine whether online platforms could eliminate the need for some parties to appear in physical courthouses. Shestowsky conducted the Michigan study – the first neutral evaluation of any family law court ODR system in the nation -- along with Jennifer Shack, director of research at Resolution Systems Institute.
The study was conducted from November 2020-August 2021 for the 20th Circuit Court Friend of the Court (FOC) program, which facilitates external investigations and furnishes information to support recommendations related to custody, parenting time and child support matters. The FOC launched its ODR program in August 2020 using a platform that allows participants to communicate with each other and their caseworker through asynchronous text and document exchanges.
The evaluation used data from the FOC, the court, the ODR platform, staff interviews and two surveys – one of parties shortly after their matters were filed with the FOC, the other of parties whose information had been entered into the ODR platform by caseworkers and whose matters closed on the platform. Among the findings:
- In 48% of 102 matters in which parties were offered ODR, both parties used it – a participation rate higher than those observed in other recently established court ODR programs in the United States, including a Texas pilot program evaluated by Shestowsky and Shack as part of their larger study. Several factors could explain the higher participation rate, including the FOC program’s lower barriers to use, better messaging/marketing, and parties’ general understanding that caseworkers would support their interactions on the platform.
- Of the 16 matters handled through ODR, 59.2% reached resolution. By comparison, 11.3% of 53 matters not addressed through ODR reached an agreement.
- Child support matters in which ODR was used closed (n=6) in 11.8 days on average, compared to 21.5 days when ODR was not used (n=9).
- ODR users were four times as likely to give high ratings for fairness of the process and almost twice as likely to give high ratings for satisfaction.
- The majority of ODR participants gave high ratings (6 or 7 on a scale of 7) when assessing the degree to which they were able to express what was important to them (61.5%) and how fairly they were treated (69.2%), among other procedural justice indicators.
- Nearly half of 16 surveyed parties who used ODR, when asked what they liked most about the platform, mentioned ease of use.
Although the findings were favorable toward ODR use, the analysis suggests the FOC could do more to educate parties about the program. The evaluators also noted that the stresses and stay-at-home recommendations of the COVID-19 pandemic might have affected parties’ responses and perceptions.
Shestowsky’s umbrella ODR project encompassed a Collin County, Texas pilot program for debt and small claims matters. That study, also a collaboration with Jennifer Shack and RSI, found that 73% of cases that used ODR resolved before trial – a rate similar to cases that had an option to use in-person mediation – but that the platform had been profoundly underutilized.
Data from the September 2019-August 2020 pilot showed that both parties used the platform in just 81 of 341 cases, or 24% of cases referred to ODR. The evaluators offered several recommendations to the court to raise awareness about the ODR platform and educate parties about how to use it.