Can chatrooms replace courtrooms?

By: Todd Feathers Driven to cyberspace by the pandemic, courts across the country purchased chatroom-like tools designed to help people resolve disagreements without the need for a full-on lawsuit, judge, or hearing. Online dispute resolution, as it’s known, had already been growing in popularity as a means to make often costly, slow-moving court processes more efficient. The tools, pioneered by eBay and PayPal, were designed to settle millions of disputes in their own businesses quickly and with as little need for human oversight as possible. But, it turns out, taking an e-commerce dispute platform and imbuing it with legal authority…

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