Our software team has been busy working diligently to refine internationally accepted language and develop exciting new features. In the coming months you will see a continued focus on our commitment to the international commercial arbitration community throughout the Dispute Resolution Data (DRD) database.
The Second Quarter of 2017 has brought some exciting enhancements to facilitate end user filtering of the top ten case types, (which were found to represent over 70% of the international case load), and focus on expanded template functionality to capture an increased number of data points per case. DRD has also continued to seek out opportunities to observe and spend time with our end users, listening and learning, to help inform us of widely accepted industry terminology. Thanks to your participation, the following discusses a few enhancements incorporated into the database recently.
One of the favorite additions has been adding a detailed Arbitration Process page to the main website in an effort to help data researchers understand where DRD fits into a typical case timeline. A series of 13 events beginning with Client’s Request for a Meeting and concluding with case completion at Award, not only portray where DRD adds value, but also describes which steps DRD reports specifically address.
Our data collection template continues to evolve, most importantly always ensuring the language we use is accepted internationally and covers both common law and civil law communities. DRD has now produced a single refined and expanded template for data contributors in an effort to capture leading edge data and offer new and innovative statistics to data researchers in the future. Collecting this new data will allow DRD to formulate some compelling trends on mediation conference and arbitration hearing durations by regions, cases types, and the overall case duration. Through user feedback we have continued to refine our case type definitions and have expanded subtypes to those that are universally understood. These definitions can now be found in the database on the Overview Page.
Finally, we have been focused on developing expanded IP authentication access for our law library and academic partners. Welcoming university law libraries from Columbia Law School, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, University of Richmond School of Law, and Charleston School of Law, DRD has been able to develop an automatic IP authentication path for these institutions. This new functionality will facilitate expanded student and faculty access and contribute to continued research and development in the international commercial arbitration community.