The ICODR Podcast

Jim will be known to many of you as co-founder, in 1996, and former CEO of mediate.com until 2020 (at which point he handed over the reins to Colin Rule). He is currently Board Chair and General Counsel for Resourceful Internet Solutions, Inc. (RIS), home to Mediate.com, Arbitrate.com, ODR.com and other leading dispute resolution sites.  Before Mediate.com, Jim founded The Mediation Center in Eugene, Oregon in 1983 and served as Executive Director of the Academy of Family Mediators (AFM) from 1987 to 1993. Jim was also the first President and Executive Director of the Oregon Mediation Association (1985-86). Jim’s undergraduate degree is in psychology from Stanford University and his law degree is from the University of Oregon. Jim has received the following awards: The Oregon Mediation Association’s 2003 Award for Excellence and 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award; The Oregon State Bar’s 2006 Sidney Lezak Award of Excellence; The Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) 2007 John Haynes Distinguished Mediator Award; and The 2012 Academy of Professional Family Mediators (APFM) “Getting To Yes” Award and 2018 APFM first Outstanding Mediator Award. More about Jim: https://mediate.com/author/jim-melamed/  

In this episode, Ian speaks with Rory Kingan, CEO of Eperoto, a legal tech company based in Sweden that helps lawyers assess cases more effectively and give clients greater clarity into litigation risk.  Originally from Auckland, New Zealand, Rory began his career in Wellington with PricewaterhouseCoopers, building New Zealand’s digital land title system. He moved to London and consulted for several years for Freshfields, Reuters, and GlaxoSmithKline, among others. He later co-founded a legal tech startup Priory Solutions, building products for large law firms to manage their subscriptions and knowledge requests — software used by most of the large US and UK firms.  After selling that company, Rory relocated to Sweden and invested in several tech startups, including Eperoto. In 2024, he took the helm as CEO, leading its international expansion and championing the use of decision analysis for greater clarity into dispute risk.   Links mentioned in the podcast: Rory’s LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rory-kingan/ Eperoto: https://eperoto.com Video walk-through of Eperoto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQL18BcwmEo Land Information NZ: https://www.linz.govt.nz 

In this episode Ian interviews Dr. Sara Hourani, a Senior Lecturer in Law at the School of Law, Middlesex University London. She also holds a Visiting Lectureship at the School of Law, Aix-Marseille University (France). Sara received an LLB degree from Grenoble II University (France), an LLM in International Trade Law and a PhD in Law from the University of Essex (UK). She was granted the prestigious UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) PhD scholarship to pursue her doctoral studies and has been the recipient of different grants and awards to carry out her research since.  Sara’s research examines the impact of automation introduced through new technologies, such as blockchain, smart contracts and artificial intelligence, on international commercial arbitration systems. Her work on the topic analyses the implications of such automation on access to justice and due process amongst other issues.  She has presented this work at numerous conferences and seminars and has published this work in various forms, including a co-edited book titled ‘Access to Justice in Arbitration: Concept, Context and Practice’ published by Wolters Kluwer in 2020. For further information, see Sara’s bio page at:  https://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/dr-sara-hourani/ and https://odr.info/sara-hourani/

In this episode, the tables are turned a bit: NCTDR Executive Director Leah Wing interviews Ian about the trends and themes he's observed over the first 35 podcasts, following on Ian's retrospective from the 2025 ODR Forum in London. Leah is Senior Lecturer II on the faculty in the Legal Studies Program where she has taught since 1993 and she is on the Steering Committee of The Center for Justice, Law, and Societies. Her teaching and research utilize law and society scholarship, to interrogate the relationship between disputing and justice. Her areas of concentration are the impact of inequality and technology on the transformation of conflict and furtherance of justice through dispute resolution processes in offline and online geographies. Her current research projects include AI, ethics and dispute resolution, crowdsourcing and spatial justice, technological responses to disaster and digital harm doing. She completed three National Science Foundation funded research projects on online dispute resolution with multidisciplinary and multi-institutional research teams. Leah is Director of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR), Past President and founding board member of the International Council for Online Dispute Resolution (ICODR), serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Online Dispute Resolution and Conflict Resolution Quarterly, and has served two terms on the Association of Conflict Resolution Board of Directors. About Leah: https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/directory/leah-wing About NCTDR: http://odr.info

In this episode of the ICODR podcast Ian interviews Dr. Chris Draper, Managing Director of Trokt, on the evolution of technology, AI, and ODR. Chris Draper is based in Des Moines, Iowa. Chris received his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Glasgow. He is also a Venture Partner with VU Venture Partners in San Francisco, California.   Chris’ ‘mission’ lies in reducing the operational risk of how humans interface with technology systems. To this end, he focuses on the development and delivery of technologies that help equitably resolve and avoid disputes ranging from labor relations to construction arbitration, financial compliance and to special needs education. Trokt is a platform designed to optimise the use of digital technologies - to ‘reduce the clutter’ - in managing workflow, negotiations, and the avoidance of digital fraud.  Chris is also Co-Chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Dispute Resolution Technology Committee. more on Chris: https://odr.info/chris-draper/ more on Trokt: https://www.trokt.com/