I have known Colin Rule for more than twenty years. During that time, I knew that he had done a lot of impressive things in ODR and that he’s a real mensch.
What I didn’t appreciate until recently was the extraordinary breadth of his work, the depth of his thinking, and how much he has helped shape modern dispute resolution.
That changed when Carli Conklin invited me to introduce Colin as the keynote speaker at Missouri’s great AI symposium last month. Preparing those remarks sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole. I read a small fraction of Colin’s many publications, and I talked with him about his life and career.
The more I learned, the more impressed I became. Colin has been busy building institutions, solving problems, helping others, and quietly moving the field forward, but many of us – including me – never fully appreciated the scope of his contributions.
Learning more about Colin led me to write an article for the forthcoming symposium issue of Missouri’s Journal of Dispute Resolution: The Life and Work of Colin Rule: ODR Visionary and Architect (So Far). The article traces Colin’s role in the evolution of ODR over the last three decades – including his early work at mediate.com, designing eBay’s ODR system, building Modria, helping shape international ODR frameworks through NCTDR, ICODR, and UNCITRAL, returning to mediate.com as its president and CEO, and helping AAA with its impressive AI initiatives. His fingerprints are all over many once-radical developments that now seem normal.
Colin has long argued that ODR should not be viewed as a peripheral corner of the dispute resolution field. Technology – the “fourth party” – shapes how modern disputes are managed, communicated, documented, and resolved. Neutrals routinely use email, text messaging, online documents, scheduling platforms, digital case management tools, and videoconferencing. Practitioners will increasingly use AI in their work. The term “online dispute resolution” can obscure this reality because it suggests a specialized activity distinct from ordinary practice. But for most practitioners, technology-assisted dispute resolution is simply dispute resolution – whether they think about it that way or not.
One reason I wanted to write this profile of Colin is that he is remarkably unpretentious. He promotes his values and ideas but not himself. We should learn from his example – though that’s not easy considering the huge amount of his work. My short law review article about him can help.
Colin’s Real Practice System
Real Mediation Systems to Help Parties and Mediators Achieve Their Goals, explains how professionals develop their practice systems in established career paths. People usually embody recognizable roles while crafting their own unique approaches. The article illustrates Real Practice Systems (RPS) Theory through in-depth analyses of the mediation systems of ten experienced mediators who described their systems in terms of their motivations, influences, goals, organizational contexts, routine practices, approaches to difficult situations, and the evolution of their work over time.
The same framework can be applied to innovators who create new institutions. Colin’s career provides an example of how a remarkable pioneer developed his own practice system. My profile of Colin uses RPS Theory to analyze his career, which offers a particularly rich example of how values, experimentation, practical usefulness, relationships, and persistence combined to shape his practice system.
Colin and the Future of Dispute Resolution
The article concludes that Colin Rule matters now more than ever. As dispute resolution enters a period of rapid transformation driven by AI, the field needs thoughtful leadership that balances innovation with fairness, trust, accessibility, and human judgment. Colin has spent much of his career thinking about exactly those issues. Fortunately for our field, he is not done yet.
For example, he is organizing the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution’s annual ODR Forum, which will be held at Harvard on June 11 in conjunction with AAA’s Symposium, Arbitration and Mediation in the Age of AI, and a Hackathon at Suffolk Law School on June 12-13.
Take a look.
