Nerding Out on Dispute Resolution: An Interview with ODR.com’s Colin Rule
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Few people know online dispute resolution (ODR) like Colin Rule. Rule, the chief executive officer of ODR.com, which was acquired by the American Arbitration Association® (AAA®) earlier this year, has been at the forefront of the industry for nearly 30 years. In a recent conversation, Rule reflected on his career, technology’s role in ODR and the need for ethical innovation.
Marrying Dispute Resolution and Technology
Rule is the first to admit he’s a nerd. “I love technology. I got my first computer, an Apple II Plus, when I was ten. It was one of the first PCs that you could own yourself in your house. I was just obsessed with it,” he said. Those early years of tinkering with computers fueled his passion for technology and laid the foundation for his future career in ODR.
While studying at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Rule developed an interest in dispute resolution and was trained as a mediator. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science and peace studies and began working for the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, D.C.
At the time, there was little connection between technology and dispute resolution. However, the rise of e-commerce in the late 1990s sparked conversations about resolving disputes between people who had never met in person. For instance, how would a customer in one location resolve a dispute with a seller halfway across the world? “And I began to think, ‘Wait a minute. I should specialize in that. I love technology and I love dispute resolution. This is where my passions cross, so I should set my flag down there.’ That was the origin,” Rule said.
In 1998, Rule attended an online conference called ADR Cyberweek, hosted by University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Ethan Katsh. The conference explored the emerging challenge of resolving disputes over the internet, sparking a debate about what to call it. Suggestions like “technology-enhanced dispute resolution” were proposed, but participants ultimately agreed on “online dispute resolution” to highlight the process’s connection to the broader field of alternative dispute resolution (ADR).
“I was part of that discussion,” Rule said. “That’s pretty cool. And now, all over the world, people talk about ODR—it’s the accepted term. Websites like ODR Africa and ODR LATAM promote the concept in other geographies. That has been really fun to see.”
In 2001, Katsh and his colleague Janet Rifkin published the first book on the subject, “Online Dispute Resolution: Resolving Conflicts in Cyberspace.” The following year, Rule, who had earned a master’s of public policy degree in technology and conflict resolution from Harvard University a few years prior, published his own ODR-themed book, “Online Dispute Resolution for Business: B2B, eCommerce, Consumer, Employment, Insurance and Other Commercial Conflicts.”
“ODR perfectly paired my passion for dispute resolution with my interest in technology. I had a sense that one day it could be important, but I had no concrete vision around how it would evolve,” Rule said.
ODR at eBay: A Really Big Deal
In 2000, Rule co-founded OnlineResolution.com, one of the first ODR providers. He was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and running his startup when he received a fateful call in 2003. It was eBay, and they wanted to talk about ODR.
“I thought I’d just give them a few hours of consulting, and that would be it, but soon they were asking, ‘Do you like managing people? How much money are you currently making?’” Rule said. Eventually, eBay made clear they wanted to bring him on full-time to lead their new ODR program in San Jose, California.
The opportunity arose thanks to a friend, Chuck Doran, CEO of Mediation Works Incorporated in Boston. “[eBay] actually called Chuck first, asking about online dispute resolution,” Rule said. “Chuck said, ‘You should talk to Colin. He’s really into this stuff.’ Whenever I see Chuck, I thank him profusely for making that connection because if he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have flown out to eBay, I wouldn’t have worked in Silicon Valley and my kids wouldn’t be Californians. It’s one of those sliding doors moments—it was that close to not happening, but it all came together.”
eBay, which also owned PayPal at the time, was one of the fastest-growing internet companies in the world. “I’d never worked at a large technology company. I had just built all my technology and configured the servers myself. Joining eBay when it was really growing like crazy was overwhelming. I learned an enormous amount in a very short period,” Rule said.
He was given millions of dollars to build eBay’s and PayPal’s ODR programs, which Katsh had helped start before Rule was hired. Rule learned a lot over his eight years at the company, developing systems that resolved approximately 60 million disputes annually, more than the U.S. civil court system. This period was not just transformative for Rule’s career but a pivotal moment for ODR. “It legitimized what we in the ODR field had been talking about, that there was a way to use software to help people work out their problems online,” Rule said.
After leaving eBay in 2011, Rule co-founded Modria, which grew into a leading ODR provider. Tyler Technologies acquired Modria in 2017, and Rule served as vice president of ODR at Tyler for the next three years. In 2020, he became CEO of Mediate.com and ODR.com, a role he continues to hold today as part of the AAA.
Slow but Steady Wins the ODR Tech Race
When Rule began his career in ODR, one of the field’s most significant challenges was limited access to technology. “If you said, ‘We’re going to let people resolve disputes over their laptops,’ well, who had laptops? Rich people had laptops. And no one wants to build solutions only for rich people,” Rule said.
At the time, much of the discussion centered on how to make technology more accessible, particularly in developing regions. “It was a hard problem to solve. No one could figure out how to do it,” Rule said. This led to skepticism about ODR’s viability, as many were reluctant to invest in a system that was not accessible to everyone.
This began to change with the advent of the cell phone, which democratized access to the internet. “Now something like 99% of Americans access the internet daily,” Rule said. “And they do it all the time. They do it every five minutes. So it’s obvious that people will want to use their mobile phones to resolve disputes.”
The obstacles ODR faces today are not technical so much as human, according to Rule. While technology evolves quickly, humans are often slower to adapt. “You can build all these great tools and say to somebody, ‘Hey, look, this is a better way for you to do this than the way you’ve done it in the past.’ And people will resist for a wide variety of reasons,” he said.
Rule noted that industries like medicine, finance and entertainment embrace technological innovations to gain a competitive edge, but the dispute resolution field does not follow the same pattern. “ADR is not an industry focused on rapid innovation. The winners in our sector aren’t necessarily those with the most cutting-edge technologies because parties don’t think about dispute resolution that way,” he said.
Instead, the dispute resolution field has adopted a more deliberate approach to technology. “We’ve had a lot of resistance—people asking, ‘Do I really need to do this? Is it better? Shouldn’t we study this first?’” Rule said. “The advances we’ve made have been slower but more thoughtful. We’ve created guardrails, considered ethical ramifications and conducted training.” He believes this measured pace has been beneficial. “It’s been less disruptive than we’ve seen in other industries, where technology completely reinvents the landscape, and no one comprehends the full consequences. In dispute resolution, we’re being careful and intentional about the changes we make,” he said.
A common saying in Silicon Valley is a quote attributed to science fiction writer William Gibson,: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Mass adoption of technology comes not with the initial invention but when it becomes “dead simple, really easy and reliable and convenient,” Rule said. For example, video hosting sites before YouTube, like Daily Motion, did not work well. “You had to wait forever for the video to load, and the quality wasn’t good. YouTube used a new technology, Flash, and suddenly, videos started playing immediately. That’s when it became truly useful and just exploded,” Rule said.
He sees the same pattern in tools like Zoom. “Video conferencing existed 20 years ago, but it was only for early adopters…The bandwidth was slow, the video quality was poor and it was sort of like a grainy postage stamp. But early adopters experimented with it and slowly improved it,” Rule said. However, it was not until the invention of Zoom, which made video conferencing seamless, that the technology became commonplace.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated the adoption of this particular technology, giving ODR a significant push forward. Before the pandemic, many mediators, arbitrators, judges and lawyers hesitated to use video conferencing, preferring face-to-face interactions. “Mediators who once told me that mediation could only be done face-to-face tried video conferencing for the first time during the pandemic, and they liked it. Now, many of them use it for most of their mediations,” Rule said.
There will inevitably be new technological innovations that are leveraged in ODR in the future as well. “Things that are inconceivable today will suddenly become normal. I’ve seen that happen multiple times over the last 25 years,” Rule said. The next big leap forward may be incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into ODR.
Thank You, Robo Judge
“AI is going to change everything,” Rule said. While there is plenty of speculation about AI’s role in ODR, Rule remains cautious about making definitive predictions. “Most people talk to me about digital mediators, arbitrators and robo judges. They believe the parties will one day come in and present in front of a robot judge, and it’ll render a perfectly reasoned award, and everyone will accept the result,” he said.
While this may be what the future holds for ADR, Rule has learned that technology does not always evolve as expected. “When we envision a new technology, we often presume it will replace humans and do the same tasks humans used to do. But technology is better at some things than humans and worse at others. It makes more sense to leverage its strengths,” he said.
Building the online mediation platform for his first ODR company, OnlineResolution.com, perfectly illustrated this lesson for Rule. Initially, he structured the website around the stages of face-to-face mediation: uninterrupted storytelling, assisted storytelling and joint problem-solving. However, this approach did not translate well to an online setting, where communication occurred through text. “Uninterrupted storytelling meant something different online because, with asynchronous text communication, everything is already uninterrupted,” he said. The shift to online interaction fundamentally altered the nature of mediation, requiring the process to be reimagined for the digital environment.
Instead of replacing human mediators or arbitrators, Rule predicts AI may play a complementary role. “It might end up being more like an advisor to us than a judge,” he said. For example, AI assistants could negotiate resolutions on our behalf, allowing us to evaluate whether the proposed solution meets our needs or requires further negotiation.
Rule also sees the potential for AI to reshape dispute resolution into something entirely new. “It might be we have new models of dispute resolution that we embrace that are not necessarily mediation or arbitration. It could be more coaching. It could be more assisted negotiation,” he said. In this way, technology becomes the “fourth party” (a phrase originally coined by Katsh and Rifkin) in a dispute. In that framework, party one and party two are the disputants, party three is the mediator or arbitrator, and party four is the technology. It is not about replacing the third party but finding new, innovative ways for technology to assist and enrich the process.
Much like breakthroughs in other industries, Rule believes AI’s potential lies in its ability to make dispute resolution simpler and more accessible. “It may be more like TurboTax,” he said. “You go through a guided workbook, which nudges you toward the right decisions.” AI could play a similar role in dispute resolution, helping people navigate complex processes while leaving room for human judgment where it matters most.
“It’s an exciting time because AI is becoming more powerful every day. I believe it will expand access to justice in meaningful ways and enrich the field of dispute resolution. But we don’t know exactly how yet,” Rule said. “We need to continue experimenting and testing our hypotheses. Then we can pursue the greatest outcome, the greatest benefit.”
Bad Actors Beware: Innovating ODR with Integrity
Reflecting on the broader history of technology, Rule observed that every major innovation—from the internet to e-commerce and social networking—has followed a familiar hype cycle. “When the internet first came out, it was all optimism,” he said. “Everyone thought, ‘This is amazing! Everyone’s going to have access to information, consumers are going to be empowered, it’s going to create empathy and understanding around the world.’ And while some of those things happened, there’s a lot of bad stuff that happened too.”
The relatively slower growth of ODR has, in some ways, been a blessing. Unlike technologies that exploded overnight, like the AI chatbot ChatGPT, ODR has had time to develop thoughtfully. “We’ve been able to put guardrails in place and evaluate who the trustworthy and untrustworthy players are. But one must be continually vigilant,” Rule said.
As AI is integrated into ODR, Rule emphasizes the importance of ethical guidelines and self-regulation. “It’s easy for me to imagine a bad actor creating an online kangaroo court where consumers seek resolutions, but the system is in cahoots with the merchants,” he said. While Rule does not believe this is currently a widespread issue, he acknowledges that it poses a significant risk that must be addressed proactively.
“There’s a place called ODR.info, the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR), where many of us who care about ODR come together to discuss the development of the field,” he said. The International Council for Online Dispute Resolution was developed by NCTDR to create ethical guidelines, principles and standards for the dispute resolution field.
“I don’t want fraudsters creating ODR sites and victimizing consumers,” Rule said. “There probably will be bad guys that try it at some time, but if we as a field can self-regulate and identify them quickly and then marginalize them, then they won’t get traffic, and people will be protected.”
Rule noted that these concerns are not unique to ODR. “This can happen in face-to-face dispute resolution, too. You can have a crooked arbitration or mediation service provider. We have to find those guys and shut them down because the integrity of what we do as a field depends on our ability to police the bad guys.”
The Road Ahead
Looking back over Rule’s nearly 30 years in ODR, one thing is clear: ODR has come a long way from its nascent days of experimentation, becoming an essential tool in our increasingly digital world. When Rule began his career, there were no mobile phones, social networks, video conferencing or artificial intelligence. Yet, as these technologies emerged, they seamlessly integrated into the ODR toolbox. Now, with breakthroughs on the horizon in AI, quantum computing and fusion energy, ODR is poised to continue evolving, offering innovative and equitable solutions for resolving conflicts. Rule’s journey serves as a reminder that behind every great innovation is a healthy mix of nerdy enthusiasm, a dash of humor and a steadfast commitment to doing the right thing.