A Note From Our Founders | Faster, Fairer, Better: The New Era ADR Promise

We celebrated the three-year anniversary this year of our launching New Era ADR and found ourselves reflecting on our journey thus far. Our “why” is clearer than ever, and we invite you to look back with us to see why we’re more optimistic than ever about what lies ahead.

By Michelle Tyler, Collin Williams, Shane Mulrooney, & Rich Lee | September 24, 2024

---

Our Why

Disagreements are an inherent risk in any relationship. New Era’s most fundamental mission is to take the temperature down when disputes arise – better preserving relationships across society:

We built New Era to resolve legal disputes on a fully virtual, easily accessible platform in 100 days out of our fundamental belief that the overwhelming majority of legal disputes in the U.S. don’t need the long, drawn out processes – and the accompanying gamesmanship, expense, and acrimony – that are synonymous with our courts and legacy arbitration systems. 

These legacy structures are difficult to navigate, inaccessible, and force a lose-lose choice on all parties in a dispute to either: 

1. engage in years of highly expensive, acrimonious, and distracting proceedings to achieve a resolution, or 
2. settle or walk away from legitimate claims or defenses simply to avoid all of that pain. 

Nobody Wins With The Old Ways

This dichotomy is even more outrageous when the reality is that not only are drawn-out processes unnecessary for the majority of legal disputes, the parties themselves (and their lawyers) don’t want to be entangled in these processes. Yet, we’ve all had to play by the rules as they existed, and we’ve all been conditioned to accept these two flawed paths as the only options because courts and legacy arbitration systems were the only choices. 

In a recent Supreme Court decision, even Justices Kentaji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh – who typically hold differing ideologies – each highlighted this gamesmanship as a problem in civil litigation.

To be clear, the problem isn’t our courts or legacy arbitration providers; they serve a critical role in the high stakes, highly complex, bet-the-company cases that do call for both sides to turn over every stone and avail themselves of every possible procedural maneuver. 

But for the majority and remainder of disputes, we have long-lacked an efficient, cost-effective, and thoughtful alternative built for cases – standard breach of contract cases, most employment cases, and consumer cases, to name just a few – in which all parties simply want to be heard and much prefer a fast resolution instead of an interminable fight or holding on to resentment over an unresolved grievance.

And that’s our why: We meet this enormous, unmet, pent-up demand by building a forum that’s more accessible, more efficient, and less acrimonious for every participant; a forum where two sides can argue over a legal dispute without souring their relationship; a forum where only merits – and NOT a party’s ability to endure painful, expensive gamesmanship – fuel the outcome of cases.

New Era Is The Forum That’s Truly Better For Every Participant

In a forum where disputes are resolved in 100 days on their merits, entirely new dynamics unseen in any legacy forum become possible… and every participant benefits:

• Individuals (such as consumers and employees) can finally pursue rightful claims without bankrupting themselves or waiting years to receive damages they’re owed. More importantly, when cases are resolved in 100 days, no one can be bullied into abandoning cases by parties with deeper pockets.
• Organizations gain a long-desired alternative to the lose-lose choice of either (1) paying to settle meritless suits or (2) spending exorbitant amounts of time, money, and attention to defend against them. They can now affordably win or negotiate far better settlements for all cases in which they have strong merit arguments – even in lower-value disputes that, in the past, meant spending more to defend against a meritless claim than the actual claim itself.
• Plaintiffs’ lawyers can recover their fees faster and help far more people across a wider range of claim sizes. That’s because New Era’s 100-day arbitration means faster awards for far lower upfront time and legal costs. With New Era, the risk of defendants dragging out proceedings to drive up a contingent fee attorney’s expenses disappears. This means plaintiffs’ lawyers can help more people with legitimate claims who don’t get representation today because claim value may be too low for plaintiffs’ lawyers to see how they would cover their costs, let alone make a profit.
• Defense attorneys can create new, highly profitable service models to retain and handle more of their clients’ litigation at New Era while also keeping their clients’ highly complex cases in court or legacy arbitration. More importantly, they no longer have to advise clients to seek alternate counsel for smaller matters, which effectively meant sending valuable clients into the arms of another law firm.
• Neutrals gain access to far more cases with New Era’s national reach and as it becomes significantly more affordable for cases to be filed and decided on their merits. New Era’s industry-leading technology platform that powers and secures all arbitration and mediation proceedings also makes Neutrals’ case administration and reporting simpler and more robust.
• All Parties gain equal access to a nationwide network of the most experienced arbitrators and mediators with the right type of experience for their cases. Parties are no longer beholden to the antiquated and often unnecessary philosophy of only searching for neutrals within a certain physical geography. 

But, just as important as these benefits, let’s also consider what doesn’t work on New Era: gamesmanship. 

• Companies can no longer wield their considerable resource advantage to leverage the inefficiencies and volumes of procedural maneuvers available to them in courts and legacy arbitration forums just to grind down and outlast legitimate claims brought against them.
• Similarly, plaintiffs can no longer file meritless claims with the sole objective of leveraging the inefficiency of courts and legacy arbitration forums to extract a nuisance settlement from a company.

Novel Solutions For Mass Claims

• Each of the foregoing principles holds true for mass claims. Our carefully crafted and highly-vetted mass arbitration process removes upfront expenses and the intense friction of having just one but even thousands of claims considered on their merits while maintaining the core tenets of arbitration, such as the individuality of cases and fundamental fairness.

Our process:

1. We use well-established bellwether principles from multi-district litigation (and not batching) to establish precedent, 
2. then we require a settlement conference to allow counsel for the parties to analyze the precedent and the veracity of their claims and defenses alongside the arbitrator, and hopefully settle the entirety of the case then and there, but if not,
3. an opt-out process ensures every single claimant has a right to be heard and that only truly similar cases are subject to precedent, and 
4. a precedent application process maintains the individuality of the claims.

The result:

• A group of plaintiffs (and the lawyers who represent them) with common, meritorious claims finally have a forum and mechanism to efficiently seek compensation for their damages. No longer will these plaintiffs have to compromise and settle for a lesser amount – or worse, reluctantly elect not to bring their claims at all – just to avoid the lengthy processes in other forums and the courts.
• Similarly, organizations no longer need to fear being held hostage by a large number of meritless claims. On New Era, the choice to defend against meritless claims is finally real and viable; it no longer points litigants to a long, painful path in legacy ADR forums and the courts with a chance at nothing more than a pyrrhic victory.

The Market Agrees

In just a short time, we are grateful to see multi-industry excitement for our platform and adoption across a wide range of use cases. More importantly, we already see instances of our vision for less acrimonious, less painful resolution come to fruition:

• Major financial institutions chose New Era to provide a customer-friendly and accessible path to resolving disputes with their individual, consumer-banking customers. 

• One of the most prestigious and well-respected sports governing bodies entrusted us to provide more accessible, more affordable, and faster dispute resolution for Olympic hopefuls in the biggest moments of their lives. And we did just that leading up to the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. 

• Technology companies, retailers, real estate firms, and entertainment companies chose New Era to provide a more accessible, less-acrimonious way to resolve employee claims, independent contractor claims, mass claims, and more. 

• Auto manufacturers adopted New Era to provide a fair, customer-friendly path to resolving large numbers of warranty and repair-related disputes. 

• And even one of the most iconic sports teams chose New Era to resolve any disputes between them and their partners, sponsors, and customers. They recognized that while disputes are a reality of business, they don’t have to result in soured relationships from the bitterness and resentment inevitable in courts and legacy arbitration.

• In all of these examples, the accessibility and expediency of the New Era platform have allowed individuals or smaller organizations to voice their grievances and put them on equal footing with large organizations in negotiating a settlement or efficiently working toward a mediation or arbitration on the merits.

The biggest takeaway across all of these examples? Parties on all sides of a dispute, and their lawyers, will choose the less acrimonious path to dispute resolution when one is available. And that’s New Era ADR. 

New Era Enables and Expands Access to Justice

As more parties and lawyers learn about the efficiency and accessibility of the New Era platform, the adoption of New Era will continue to expand across the legal landscape and expand access to justice – an issue we’re keenly focused on in everything we build. As a result, we envision a future where more low income individuals will have the ability to advocate for themselves, and just as importantly, millions of individuals who don’t qualify for legal aid but still cannot afford an attorney to represent them in lengthy court or legacy arbitration proceedings can now find legal help for New Era’s straightforward, highly-accessible, user-friendly, and fully virtual 100-day process.

Our Mission is Clear, and It’ll Always be Day One at New Era

We’ve built an exciting, fast-growing list of customers and law firm supporters, but we’re just getting started and have plans for so much more innovation and technology toward improving relationships across society. 

One thing is already crystal clear though: we will always stay laser-focused on delivering an accessible, fair, second-to-none user experience for all parties on our platform and we will remain true to our founding goal of enabling people to resolve differences without escalating animosity.

If you haven’t yet, we’d love for you to join us on our mission.  

The New Era ADR Founders,

Michelle, Collin, Shane, & Rich