Adaptation and Innovation. Those are the themes of the new Resolution Systems Institute annual report. Like many organizations, RSI has opted to sum up 2020 and 2021 together – a reflection of the degree to which we have been consumed by the urgent demands of these extraordinary times.
As we lift our heads from our work for a moment, we’re proud to review all that our efforts have helped accomplish over the past couple years.
From designing and operating three new eviction mediation programs in Illinois, to convening experts from across the US to explore the potential of online dispute resolution for family court, to curating resources for a special topic on eviction mediation, to providing evaluation of both our own and others’ alternative dispute resolution programs, RSI has been busy adapting and innovating in an effort to mitigate some of the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This work is improving outcomes. To take just one local example, our Kane County, Illinois, Eviction Mediation Program served over 100 households in the final few months of 2021, after Illinois ended its eviction moratorium on October 3. Mediators handled 66 cases, providing a vital forum for parties to hear and be heard, and leading to 45 agreements. Afterward, 89% of parties responding to surveys expressed satisfaction with the mediation experience. In addition, RSI helped navigate hundreds of community members to housing counseling, rental assistance and legal aid services.
Of course, everything RSI has accomplished in our 27 years of operation has been made possible by our dedicated program partners, generous funders, and everyone who joins us in working to increase access to justice through court alternative dispute resolution.
We invite you to review the Resolution Systems Institute 2020-2021 Annual Report and learn more about what we’ve accomplished together. We hope you will continue to support our work and be a part of finding creative solutions that improve outcomes for disputing parties, while reducing the strain on our nation’s court systems.
Welcome to RSI’s Board Member Profile series! Each profile will feature a different member of RSI’s talented and dedicated Board of Directors. We begin this month with Board President Brian Roche, who was elected to the position in April to fill the unexpired term of Raven Moore. Raven stepped down amid increasing demands from her expanding role in the counsel’s office at McDonald’s Corporation, which will take her overseas. (Lucky for RSI, she is able to remain a Board member.)
Prior to being elected Board President, Brian Roche served as Board Vice President since 2015. He has been on the RSI Board since 2010. Brian is a partner in Reed Smith’s Litigation Department, focusing on intellectual property and technology disputes. We asked him to share a bit about how alternative dispute resolution fits into his practice, the importance of RSI’s work, and his goals as Board President.
RSI Board President Brian Roche
Can you tell us a bit about your law practice?
My practice is intellectual property litigation. I focus predominantly on patent, trade secret litigation, high-tech wireless communications, medical devices, electronic securities trading and software, database networking and telecommunications. I’ve been doing this work for about 25 years. It’s been an exciting area, especially as we’ve seen the technology breakthroughs in telecommunications in speed and bandwidth. What has come with that is a lot of disputes with patent holders over who owns the technology, who owns the rights. It has involved some of the largest companies in America trying to protect what they are developing. And people trying to preserve what they have developed against people who say, “Hey, I did it first; I got a patent.”
How do you use alternative dispute resolution in your practice?
It’s a central part of (intellectual property) litigation in the US today. The courts favor having parties try to resolve the litigation through negotiation. Every court does it differently; some encourage mediation early on, some recognize that it’s not effective early on and encourage it after there’s been more evidence developed in the case before the trial. Others do it right before you go to trial. But these mediations sometimes last a couple days. The mediators tend to be active and retired judges, and retired litigators that used to do what I do now. I have actively been doing ADR since it began. It became a normal thing in the kind of work I do in the 1990s. Before then, it was really unusual.
What attracted you to/made you want to join the RSI board?
I didn’t have much contact with what RSI was doing until a colleague introduced me to the organization, and that was (RSI Board member) Hon. Morton Denlow. He was a federal magistrate at the time, and before that he was a partner with me at this law firm. He was recruiting to try to expand the board to get younger lawyers who were active in law firms. At that time RSI’s board was heavily focused on former and current judges. So he invited me, and I joined.
What’s your favorite thing about being on the board?
What I have really enjoyed is that the mediation RSI focuses on is not between big corporations that have the best law firms and best lawyers in the country working for them, and that can afford to hire the best private mediators. That’s not what RSI’s about.
RSI is about making the legal process that ordinary people occasionally run into better by having a way to have it resolved quickly. They get to participate immediately and don’t have to spend years litigating. That’s really what RSI is trying to do and has been able to do effectively in areas where people in these lawsuits are not regularly in the legal world. If there’s a problem with their mortgage, or a family dispute, such as divorce or child custody. And also small disputes, like with a contractor or a neighbor. Those are the kinds of disputes we believe can really be solved with mediation, if the courts are supporting and encouraging it.
So what’s been exciting about what we’ve done with RSI is we’ve partnered with the courts, predominantly in Illinois to advance mediation as an alternative to full-blown litigation. During the mortgage crisis that began in 2008, seeing what RSI was able to accomplish was remarkable: people who thought they were going to lose their homes found a way to keep their homes through mediation.
Another of the things that excites me about taking on the role of Board President is working directly with our Executive Director, Susan Yates, who is a national leader in mediation in the courts and a national leader in innovative ways to move mediation online. I’m very excited about working closely with her.
In your RSI bio, you say that court ADR is often “a better and more efficient process” than litigation. What makes it that way?
I think that was referring to the context of what I do in these large cases, but applying it more to RSI, it can also be the best way for disputes to get resolved. People get hauled into court unexpectedly; they don’t have resources to hire a lawyer for a long fight. Really, all they want to do is tell their side of the story to the other side. They can hear the other side, and they get a neutral person to help resolve it, and most of the time, things get resolved that way. There’s recognition that litigation might go on for years, so for people who aren’t familiar with the court process, mediation can be a savior.
Do you have any particular plans or things on your to-do list as Board President?
One focus is attracting younger people to the board who are excited about RSI’s mission, so there is confidence the organization will continue for years into the future; that it’s influenced by younger people who see different ways to resolve these kinds of problems, who have new ideas, new energy, new blood. Getting younger people from all different communities to join the board is a high priority.
The second priority is to see if we can expand services in the area of family disputes – in particular child protection cases in which children have been removed from their homes due to allegations of neglect or abuse. These are so difficult for families. Mediation has proved to be effective – it can be even more effective with online tools available today. And also just to be supportive of the courts in their own efforts to expand ADR in small claims, mortgage and rent disputes, among others.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has strained finances, families and the social fabric in general, the need for and potential of well-designed alternative dispute resolution (ADR) to stitch together solutions has become increasingly apparent. Throughout this challenging time, Resolution Systems Institute (RSI) has continued to monitor and evaluate new dispute resolution initiatives and developed new court mediation programs of our own. Below is a description of some of our work during the pandemic.
In 2020, as a potential pandemic-driven eviction wave loomed, RSI began to design our first eviction mediation program. In the course of about nine months, we developed the court rules, procedures and forms the program would need to operate. We also recruited a cadre of mediators and provided them with specialized eviction mediation training through our friends at the Center for Conflict Resolution. The Kane County (Illinois) Eviction Mediation Program launched in spring 2021. Later that fall, RSI launched similar programs in Illinois’ Kankakee and Winnebago counties. Overall, our programs operate in judicial districts that serve over 920,000 Illinois residents.
To learn more about RSI’s work over the last two years in the eviction arena, we recommend you check out our blog entries on the topic, as well as our Eviction Mediation Special Topics resource. RSI is now working with Kane and Winnebago counties to bolster their longstanding foreclosure mediation programs as homeowners now begin to feel the squeeze that renters started experiencing last year.
In partnership with the University of California, Davis, RSI has also evaluated online dispute resolution (ODR) pilot programs in Texas and Michigan. The pandemic generated greater interest among courts for ADR processes that parties could access remotely. The evaluations, which will be released soon, will provide courts with a better understanding of what ODR adoption requires and what possible benefits it can provide.
The last two years have provided many of us, RSI included, with a complex mix of setbacks and new opportunities. RSI is committed to innovating and adapting to meet the challenges that courts, and the litigants they serve, encounter in this ever-changing world. We are grateful to our program partners, our funders and each of you who come to RSI in search of expertise and guidance. We hope you will continue to take this journey with us as we work towards our mission of expanding access to justice through court alternative dispute resolution.
RSI is pleased to announce we have added two new Special Topics to our Resource Center. One is about Restorative Justice and its relationship to court ADR and the other is about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility in court ADR. RSI develops Special Topics from time to time to respond to issues people who work with court ADR are facing. These latest Special Topics join others on subjects such as eviction mediation, online dispute resolution and child protection mediation.
Both these Special Topics were made possible by a grant from the American Arbitration Association – International Centre for Dispute Resolution Foundation. Thank you to the AAA-ICDR Foundation!
