In a December 7, 2021 guest post, I reported that the Academy of Court-Appointed Masters (ACAM) had opened up its membership to people who have never previously served as special masters and was working on a training and mentoring program.  OK, so here’s the sequel.

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In a September 15, 2021 post, I described the decision by the Academy of Court-Appointed Master (ACAM) (1) to try to open up the special masters profession by inviting people who had not previously served as special masters to join our organization and to receive training, mentoring and professional standards; and (2) to partner with other organizations both public and private both to recruit diverse candidates to serve as special masters and to

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The problem with chickens and eggs isn’t which one comes first.  It’s that that neither comes at all. 

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Based on initial feedback from the Global Pound Conference, a Mixed Modes Task Force has been set up by the College of Commercial Arbitrators (CCA), the International Mediation Institute (IMI) and the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine School of Law to examine possible new ways of combining mediation with arbitration.

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These days, it is common to hear members of the alternative dispute resolution community point out that the moniker “alternative dispute resolution” is a misnomer. If 90-odd% of cases that are not resolved by motion are going to settle, it is pretty difficult to call settlement the alternative dispute resolution.

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In Part Fourteen, we discussed a program in California state courts that makes regular use of special masters in construction cases. So who else is making regular use of alternate dispute resolution talent?

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In Part Thirteen, we discussed ways of institutionalizing the use of special masters by maintaining rosters, choosing them based on qualifications and experience, training them and evaluating their effectiveness. We closed by raising the question – has this been done before?

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In Part Twelve, we suggested harnessing the motivation that has led courts to refer cases to settlement conferences or to insist on private mediation in favor of an alternative – a plan regularly to refer cases sufficiently complex to benefit from active case management for oversight by a special master.

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In Part Eleven, we urged that the more regular the process is of retaining special masters, the most likely it is to achieve its function of holding down costs by heading off disputes. We suggested that we should change our historic practice by making the possible use of special masters more the rule than the exception. So what does that mean?

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In Parts Nine and Ten, we discussed how there is a rap on using special masters that stems the way in which special masters are selected and used. As we discussed, currently, when judges bring special masters into cases it is generally both ad hoc (specific to the case, and chosen based on virtually no standardized criteria) and post hoc (often to deal with messy disputes after they have arisen and potentially become intractable, instead of up fr

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