Looking Back at the First 18 Months of Arbitrate.com

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Mediate.com launched its spinoff online community Arbitrate.com on March 1, 2021, and the site has made an enormous amount of progress since then. We thought we’d take a look back on the past 18 months and share some milestones.

Our goal for Arbitrate.com was to create the primary destination on the web for everything arbitration, both international and domestic.  We designed it to have a quick editorial cycle, with active streams of blog posts, interviews, and podcasts posted in real time. 

Arbitrate.com’s focus is on the day-to-day developments in arbitration, but also on where the arbitration field is going, and should be going. We have a strong commitment to diversity and amplifying the voices that haven’t traditionally been at the front of the room. But fundamentally the site is about helping arbitrators spread the word about their services and find quality work, as well as creating opportunities for students to learn about arbitration, get involved with the field, and share their writing and research.

In today’s world, Online Arbitration (OArb), mixed-mode, judicial arbitration, and Med-Arb are also pushing the frontiers of practice and inventing new ways to meet the needs of parties. We believe that the promise of arbitration — faster, better, fairer outcomes — is brighter than ever. Our goal is for  Arbitrate.com to pave the way into the next century, cementing arbitration’s vital role in conflict management and dispute resolution.

In service of those objectives, we’ve hosted four major online conferences over the past year:

Diversity in Arbitration (Domestic and International)

The Ethics of NDAs in Arbitration and Mediation

Resolving Sexual Misconduct Disputes in the Workplace: What now?

Recent Supreme Court Arbitration Decision Review

These events (free for all participants) have involved many of the top minds in arbitration from around the US and the world. If you’d like to watch any of the recordings, just click the banners above.

Our web series The Arbitration Conversation, hosted by Professor Amy Schmitz, completed 100 video interviews at end of 2021, and then we converted it to a podcast, which can be found at https://arbitrate.podbean.com/. You can listen to one of our most popular recent episodes (on Facebook’s Oversight Board) by clicking on the banner below.

We also launched the Directory of Black Arbitrators, and we sent out the first edition of our newsletter, “The Broadcast”, to the members of the Directory in July 2022.  The Directory is an evolution of the Arbitrators of African Descent list that was started by Nancy Thevenin and Katherine Simpson in February 2020.  We now offer free listings to any black arbitrators around the world who would like to join. To view the Directory, just visit http://arbitrate.com/dba.

We also have a bi-weekly newsletter (now on issue #39) chronicling all the latest developments in arbitration called Arbitration Today.  You can sign up for free here: https://arbitrate.com/arbitrationtoday/

We’re very proud of the progress we’ve made with Arbitrate.com over the past 18 months, but we feel like we’re still just getting started. Arbitration is a rapidly growing field around the world, and we’re committed over the long term to convene the conversations and build the community that will help it live up to its potential. Arbitration must be an ethical, transparent, representative, effective, and trustworthy mechanism for parties to resolve their disputes – and we must always be vigilant in rooting out practices practitioners that undermine those objectives.

If you’re interested in joining us, we’d love to have you. Just sign up for our newsletter or pick a membership option here: Arbitrate.com/Membership