Conferences often produce engaging conversations and new connections. The best ones also produce ideas that continue to evolve and reach new audiences long after the final session ends. With that in mind, Eleni Kosta (Tilburg Law School, NL), Diana M. Bowman (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, AUS)*, and I are pleased to share a new white paper capturing the proceedings of our July 2025 conference, Tech-Trust Nexus: Revolutionizing Online Dispute Resolution hosted by the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) at Tilburg University.
The conference brought together scholars and practitioners to examine how emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, are changing online dispute resolution and what those changes mean for trust in dispute resolution systems. Over the course of the program, participants examined how artificial intelligence, platform design, digital governance, and online dispute resolution systems are reshaping the ways individuals and institutions prevent, manage, and resolve conflict.
Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence featured prominently throughout many of the discussions. What struck me, however, was how often the discussion returned to questions that ADR scholars and practitioners have long confronted. How do users develop trust in a process? What makes a system legitimate? How can efficiency and accessibility be improved without sacrificing perceptions of fairness, transparency, accountability, and procedural justice? While the technologies may be new, many of the underlying questions are quite familiar.
The white paper captures the conference’s principal themes, areas of consensus, and important unresolved questions. It also examines how technological innovation can strengthen dispute resolution systems without undermining the trust on which their effectiveness depends. One product of the conference is the T-Matrix, a framework developed to better understand and evaluate the interaction between technological design choices and user trust in dispute resolution systems. The framework is intended to help scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and system designers think more systematically about the ways technology may strengthen, weaken, or reshape trust in dispute resolution processes.
For Eleni, Di, and me, the white paper represents the next step in a collaboration that we hope to continue. We are grateful to everyone who participated in these amazing conversations, shared their expertise, and helped make the conference—and now this publication—possible.
The white paper, titled Report on the Conference on “Tech-Trust Nexus: Revolutionizing Online Dispute Resolution“ is freely available through SSRN.
* Note, Di Bowman is formerly of Arizona State and now the inaugural dean at the new RMIT School of Law in her hometown of Melbourne, and she is killing it there.
