Just Court ADR

Workshops Can Help Courts, Others Better Communicate with Self-Represented Parties

Stephen Sullivan, January 14th, 2026

RSI is offering a series of online workshops to help courts and organizations enhance their ADR program communication materials. During these workshops — From Confusion to Clarity: Court Communications that Work — RSI’s researchers will work with participants to review and improve their communication materials, including notices, webpages and videos. Participants will walk away with new or updated materials and the strategies to ensure future communications can effectively serve their communities, including self-represented litigants (SRLs).

Improving Court Experience Remains a Priority

Courts continue to face diminished public trust and a lack of confidence among those who go through the legal system. The 2025 State of the State Courts report by the National Center for State Courts found that poor communications are a major driver of access to justice issues. People find court forms and paperwork confusing or hard to understand, and they lack information about what to expect from court processes, the report notes. In line with these findings, a recent Pew study on perceptions of state and local courts found that US adults want courts to be easier to navigate, to work for all users and to be more user-friendly.

According to the Pew study, one-third of people who have had a court experience emerged with diminished confidence in the courts. More than half of those with court experience found it difficult to understand how to fill out court forms and to understand the steps of their cases. The latter finding held true across demographic groups, including age, education level and income level, and regardless of whether the respondent was a plaintiff or defendant.

Most people also said courts should focus on making processes easier to navigate rather than making them faster. The same Pew study found that 71% of survey respondents with court experience and 68% of survey respondents without court experience said courts should make it easier for people to navigate the system rather than diverting their resources to speed up cases and reduce costs.

Why We Designed the Workshops

RSI’s OPEN research demonstrates that simple and easy-to-understand communications can meaningfully address some of the biggest challenges facing court users. Through usability testing, we found that our accessibly designed OPEN communication models boosted people’s confidence in navigating their case and enabled them to more capably follow the steps required to participate in ADR programs.

Easy-to-understand court communications are especially important for SRLs, people with low literacy and people with low digital literacy. Courts can make important inroads to improving court experience and building trust by addressing barriers in their communication materials. Our OPEN research also highlights scaffolding as an effective strategy for making the steps within court programs easy to follow.

Yet RSI recognizes that courts may not have sufficient resources for a full consultation to improve their materials. We developed these workshops to be low-cost opportunities for court staff to begin addressing these issues. By participating in our workshops, participants can take the first step to improving their existing communication materials or creating new materials that better serve their communities.

What the Workshops Will Cover

We are offering four workshops over the next few months. Each workshop will be 3 hours long and cost $350. Each will take place 12-3 pm Central/1-4 pm Eastern, via Zoom. Below are descriptions of each workshop:

Wednesday, February 25 — Workshop 1: Public-Facing Documents. Bring the documents you would like to modify or thoughts on what you want to create. You will leave with documents that are written and formatted so that SRLs will understand and act on any instructions. Register & pay now for Workshop 1, or Register & receive an invoice for Workshop 1. Please register by February 18.

Wednesday, March 25 — Workshop 2: Websites. Bring your webpages or ideas. Leave with a layout and draft content you can bring to your IT department. Register & pay now for Workshop 2, or Register & receive an invoice for Workshop 2. Please register by March 18.

Wednesday, April 22 — Workshop 3: Videos. We will help you take your ideas for a video and turn them into a storyboard to provide your communications department or consultant, or ready for you to create your own video. Register & pay now for Workshop 3, or Register & receive an invoice for Workshop 3. Please register by April 15.

Wednesday, May 20 — Workshop 4: Putting it All Together. Learn how to take your different communication methods and turn them into a workflow that enhances SRL trust and confidence in navigating an unfamiliar process. Register & pay now for Workshop 4, or Register & receive an invoice for Workshop 4. Please register by May 13.

We are excited to use what we have learned through the OPEN Project to help you with your communication needs. Please reach out to research@aboutrsi.org for any questions you may have about the workshops.

Posted in Accessibility, ADR Resources, Online Dispute Resolution, OPEN Project, Training, Skills & Techniques | No Comments »

How Well Can an AI Facilitator Recognize Emotions During Dispute Resolution?

Jennifer Shack, December 1st, 2025

Recent research suggests that large-language models (LLMs) acting as facilitators in text-based dispute resolution can be trained to accurately identify human emotions and to intervene to change the trajectory of a dispute when the emotions might otherwise lead to an impasse.

The authors^[1] of the August 2025 paper “Emotionally-Aware Agents for Dispute Resolution” recruited students to act as disputants regarding the sale of a basketball jersey. The ultimate dataset included 2,025 disputes, with an average 10.7 messages per dispute.

To allow for comparison with prior research, the researchers initially categorized emotions as others had done to assess LLM capacity to identify emotions in negotiations.^[2] The emotions tracked were joy, sadness, fear, love, anger and surprise. The study also used a self-measure frustration scale as an indication of “ground truth” to be used as a benchmark for comparison with the LLMs’ identification of emotions. The dispute participants assessed their level of frustration during the dispute exchange, as well as their perception of the other party’s level of frustration.

GPT-4o’s automatic identification of emotion showed that when sellers respond to buyers’ anger with anger in these dialogues, the anger spirals, and impasse results. They found something similar with compassion. When sellers began with compassion, buyers responded with compassion, and the dialogue more often resulted in agreement.

To set a baseline against prior emotion models, the researchers first ran the disputants’ text exchanges through T5-Twitter, a large fine-tuned model adapted for recognizing emotions.^[3] They found that T5-Twitter (T5) failed to recognize anger in conversations that participants had reported as frustrating. The researchers hypothesized that this was because T5 was classifying each dialogue turn in isolation, rather than within the context of the entire interaction. Although they had adopted the emotions used for negotiation research, the researchers also noted that those emotions were more relevant to negotiation than to dispute resolution, which concerned them.

Testing Other LLMs

The next phase of the study was to test the researchers’ hypothesis that general LLMs could better identify emotions than T5 had. The researchers prompted a variety of LLMs to analyze the same dialogues, using different prompting strategies, but with slightly different emotions. They changed the emotion “love” to “compassion” and added a “neutral” category so the LLMs were not forced to choose an emotion when none was apparent. They also prompted the LLMs to consider each dialogue turn within the context of previous turns. Finally, they helped the LLMs to learn within context by including in the prompt several sample dialogue turns with hand-annotated emotions.

Again comparing self-reported frustration with each LLM’s classification of emotions, the researchers found that GPT-4o outperformed T5 (as well as other LLMs). T5 skewed toward annotating utterances as joy or anger, while GPT-4o was more diverse in its assessments and used “neutral” as a dampener by not assigning emotions to unemotional statements. GPT-4o also recognized compassion where T5 did not recognize love.

The researchers then used multiple linear regression^[4] to predict participants’ subjective feelings about the result of the dispute resolution effort (as measured by the Subjective Value Inventory) based upon the emotions that T5 and GPT-4o assigned to each dialogue turn. They found that GPT-4o provided the biggest improvement in predicting participants’ feelings about the result, even when accounting for changes in prompts to T5. They also found that buyers were more straightforward to predict than sellers.

Preventing Impasse

The researchers then examined whether GPT-4o could determine when to intervene to de-escalate anger before it escalates into impasse. This would require GPT-4o to identify a pattern of escalation. GPT-4o’s automatic identification of emotion showed that when sellers respond to buyers’ anger with anger in these dialogues, the anger spirals, and impasse results. They found something similar with compassion. When sellers began with compassion, buyers responded with compassion, and the dialogue more often resulted in agreement.

In sum, the researchers demonstrated that properly prompted LLMs with in-context learning can accurately assign emotions to text. Additionally, they found that they could predict subjective dispute outcomes from emotional expressions alone, without knowing the actual content of a conversation.

Researchers can use GPT-4o emotion assignment to reveal how emotions can shape disputes over time: Anger spirals, but so does compassion when it comes early in the dispute. This indicates that LLMs can be trained to know when to intervene in order to change the trajectory of a dispute. Future work will look at how they can do this.

[1] The authors are Sushrita Rakshit, James Hale, Kushal Chawla, Jeanne M. Brett and Jonathan Gratch.

[2] They characterize negotiations as a coming together to create a new relationship (e.g., car salesman and customer), while disputes involve an existing relationship that has gone badly.

[3] I’m extrapolating here, based on the context and what I could find about fine-tuned LLMs.

[4] Multiple linear regression uses several independent variables to predict a specific outcome.

Posted in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Online Dispute Resolution, Research | No Comments »

New Resources Help Address Barriers to Diversifying Organization’s Mediator Roster

Stephen Sullivan, October 24th, 2025

RSI recently completed our evaluation of an equity audit implementation project by the Center for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Chicago. CCR staff, board members and volunteers worked with a consulting partner to uncover barriers preventing their volunteer mediator roster from fully reflecting the diversity of the communities CCR serves. After identifying barriers, they made major changes to how CCR recruits and screens applicants to its Mediator Mentorship Program (MMP), which onboards mediators to volunteer at CCR. RSI evaluated the efficacy of CCR’s implementation and examined initial outcomes of the revamped process.

We are excited to share that our evaluation report, Fostering Equity in a Volunteer Mediator Roster: An Evaluation of the Center for Conflict Resolution’s Equity Audit Implementation, is now available on RSI’s website. The report includes our findings from surveying, interviewing and observing staff, board members and volunteers who participated in the project and facilitated CCR’s new applicant screening and recruiting processes.

In addition to the evaluation, we created a guide for community mediation centers, to help them learn from CCR’s efforts.In A Guide for Enhancing Mediator Roster Equity from Concept to Implementation, we document the strategies CCR staff, board members and volunteers took to address barriers to equity in the MMP. We describe which approaches were most effective and which were less effective, and we provide recommendations for staff at other community mediation centers (CMCs).

A Guide for Community Mediation Centers

The guide contains step-by-step instructions to help mediation centers adapt CCR’s approaches to addressing barriers that could keep people from a variety of backgrounds from applying and participating fully as CMC mediators. It advises CMCs on how to build alignment among staff and volunteers on a set of equity-related goals; retool application materials to collect more accurate and relevant information about applicants to their programs; and create more effective screening processes to assess applicants’ mediation-related skill sets.

CCR staff found that their experience with the equity audit and its implementation challenged previously held assumptions about how to best enhance diversity. For example, did you know that using predominantly written application materials might hamper efforts at diversifying mediator rosters? Or that activity-based group interviews might provide more relevant and useful information about applicants’ capacities to be successful mediators than traditional one-on-one interviews?

In the guide, we explain what CCR staff learned about these issues and describe the creative solutions they devised to address them. One major solution is the Matching Event, CCR’s innovative new format for screening applicants to the MMP.

During a Matching Event, applicants participate in a series of stations involving activities designed to assess specific skills, such as being empathetic and being comfortable with conflict. Stations are facilitated by two CCR “Station Runners” (staff or volunteer mentors), with activities that range from describing the emotions of characters in a movie clip to role playing as parties in conflict. Station Runners use CCR’s newly crafted Matching Event Scorecard to rate the extent to which applicants meet these criteria.

CCR generously permitted RSI to include its Matching Event materials in the guide, so that others can understand how they work in greater detail. We also wrote step-by-step instructions to help CMCs craft their own Matching Events, should that fit their applicant assessment needs.

Takeaways for CMCs

RSI had two overarching aims with the evaluation: The first was to assess the successes and challenges involved with the process of implementing the audit recommendations; the second, to evaluate the effectiveness and results of implementation activities, such as staff training sessions and the Matching Events. While the evaluation’s findings and recommendations are geared toward CCR, they have broader implications for other CMCs interested in doing similar work.

Below is a set of key takeaways for CMCs interested in making the role of community mediator accessible to more of the people with the skills to participate. These takeaways are based on what we learned from conducting the evaluation as well as working with CCR staff, board members and volunteers to create the guide.

A successful audit and implementation project requires collaboration, time and consistent communication. CCR staff, board members and volunteers needed plenty of time to review and reflect on the findings of the audit before they could take action. Collaboration helped to make the process more effective; by bringing different stakeholders together during workshops and meetings, CCR was able to build buy-in and ensure different aspects of the program were addressed. Staff and volunteers also benefited most when they were updated on the project’s progress.

Meaningful change requires an open mind and flexibility. CCR leadership gave staff and volunteers wide latitude to make changes to program processes. As a result, staff and volunteers felt empowered to address barriers creatively and maintained investment in the project. Many of the barriers were long standing mindsets and processes; permission to make major changes was critical to the project’s success.

Making processes more flexible does not reduce program rigor. One of the most noteworthy learning lessons for CCR was that a one-size-fits-all approach for participation in the MMP is not a prerequisite to maintaining quality program standards. By introducing flexibility to MMP processes and expanding outreach, CCR was able to create opportunities for volunteer mediators from diverse backgrounds to contribute to the organization while keeping rigorous requirements in place.

Enhancing pathways to program participation is an ongoing dialogue and process. From the outset, CCR recognized that any changes made to the MMP as a result of this project would need to be revisited as their outcomes became clear. Building broader access to the program is a process; CCR has planned time for staff and volunteers to further reflect and make changes as needed.

Posted in Accessibility, Community Mediation, Diversity and Inclusion, Program Design, Research | No Comments »

What Can We Learn from One Short Quiz?

Jasmine Henry, September 15th, 2025

Do you know the best ways to communicate with self-represented litigants (SRLs)? That’s the question we asked our newsletter readers and social media followers over the last two months through a short (four-question) quiz. Our initial answer is in: Most quiz takers have some understanding of how best to share information with SRLs, but they also have the space to learn more.

***Webinar 1: Enhancing Understanding While Reducing Stress***
Wednesday, October 15, Noon-1 p.m. CT
**Register for Webinar 1**

***Webinar 2: Creating Trust and Addressing the Tech Gap***
Wednesday, November 12, Noon-1 p.m. CT
**Register for Webinar 2**

Our four questions — meant to be fun, engaging and educational — were based on the findings of our ODR Party Engagement (OPEN) Project. In prior research, RSI had observed the struggles SRLs can have navigating court processes, and we knew that court communications are not geared toward the 57% of the population that cannot read proficiently. So we set out to find out what SRLs need and want from court communications.

With funding from the American Arbitration Association-International Centre for Dispute Resolution Foundation, we conducted focus groups across the U.S. to learn how to improve communications for SRLs. Using what we learned, we worked with an inclusive designer and an accessibility expert to create model communication materials. We conducted usability tests around the U.S. to get feedback on these new materials. Users gave our new Notice, website and video an average 4.8/5 rating for ease of understanding.

Now, we are committed to helping courts and other organizations better communicate with SRLs. Our quiz helps us achieve this goal by providing quiz takers with the best answers and explaining why they are the most effective options. If you would like to learn more about our findings, resources, guide and toolkit, check out the website we created (odr.aboutRSI.org) to share our knowledge with courts.

Before you continue with our article, we invite you to take our quiz and test your OPEN knowledge!

What the scores are and why they don’t matter.

As of the time of this writing, 33 people had responded to our quiz. Their average score was 42%. Though that’s a score that might feel demoralizing for some, we view it as an opportunity for quiz takers to gain essential knowledge about how to communicate with SRLs.

What we can learn from our hardest questions.

Two quiz questions stood out as particularly difficult, with less than half of the takers answering either question correctly. The questions focused on the best types of illustrations to use in documents and the best method for providing information on a webpage, respectively.

Best type of illustration to use

We asked quiz takers what type of illustration should accompany text about signing an agreement. We gave them four options, as seen in the table below. The response options included two photos and two illustrations. Despite photos making up half of the answer options, only 18% of quiz takers chose a photo as the best option. This suggests that court professionals might understand that photos are typically too complex to be used in instructive text. However, most quiz takers selected the complex illustration as the best option to accompany instructive text. Just over a quarter of quiz takers selected the correct answer: the simple illustration.

Quiz Question: What is the best visual to accompany text about signing an agreement?

Answer Choices	Percentage of Quiz Takers Selecting Answer
A. A complex illustration	55%
B. A simple photo	6%
C. A complex photo	12%
D. A simple illustration	27%

Any visuals used in communication materials for SRLs should highlight major concepts and draw the reader’s attention to them. They should not contain additional visual details that are not important to the core of your message, because excessive features can become distractions that pull your user’s focus from the relevant content.

Best method for providing information on a webpage

The question on webpage formatting got 32 responses. Quiz takers were asked if any of the following were good methods for providing information on a webpage. We gave them four options, as reflected in the table below, plus a “none of the above” option. While there was no majority agreement on this question, the largest segment of quiz takers indicated that it is a good idea to place many links on one page, and the smallest segment answered that it is best to fill both the left and right sides of the page with helpful information. A little under 20% of the quiz takers answered this question correctly, selecting “none of the above.”

Quiz Question: Which of the following is a good method for providing information on webpages?

Answer Choices	Percentage of Quiz Takers Selecting Answer
A. Place a list of links on one page, so that users can see all the resources available in one place	44%
B. Have a user-entered search box where SRLs are directed to find information	22%
C. Fill both the right and left sides of the page with helpful information	6%
D. Provide information to users via downloadable PDFs	9%
E. None of the above	19%

While any of these answers might sound like a good tip, you will want to avoid all of them. Unfortunately, it is not helpful to provide a long list of links because that can lead to “link-surfing,” where users jump around on your webpage without actually reading and absorbing any information. It is also not recommended to have a user-entered search box because sometimes users do not know the terminology for the help they seek; or, if they do know the term, they may have difficulty spelling it accurately.

Moreover, filling the whole page with information can lead your user to feel overwhelmed; instead, it is best to create white space on your webpage and keep the most important information to one side of your screen. It is also important to remember that many users are approaching your webpage via their phone or a borrowed computer and may not have access to a PDF reader, digital storage device or free printer. Thus, it is important to embed all important information within the text of your webpage itself so it is easily accessed by all your users.

Want to learn more?

This fall, RSI will present two free webinars for courts, ADR professionals and others. In our series — From Confusion to Clarity: Court Communications that Work — we will offer insights into barriers to program communication and participation and how you can address those barriers. We will provide practicable “good” and “bad” examples and actionable tips on making court communications that your users will understand, trust and use.

So if you took our quiz and it left you wanting to learn more, click on the links to learn more and sign up for our webinars! Webinar 1: Enhancing Understanding While Reducing Stress takes place Wednesday, October 15 from Noon to 1 p.m. Central. Webinar 2: Creating Trust and Addressing the Tech Gap will be on Wednesday, November 12, from Noon to 1.pm. Central.

While participation is free, registration is required.

Posted in Accessibility, ADR Resources, OPEN Project, RSI's Resource Center | No Comments »