/biz/ - Business & Finance

The new economic reality is online. This was true before COVID-19; it is rampant now with entire industries of homebound workers, likely to remain this way for some time.

A new global institutional infrastructure is required for securing transactions and providing dispute resolution services trusted by the new economic actors to deliver neutral decisions, quickly and inexpensively.


The premise of decentralized justice – a premise difficult to refute – is that traditional systems of justice are cumbersome and have little to offer to solve disputes in a way that matches the immediacy, the speed and the peer-to-peer ethos of e-commerce.

Famous technology investor Marc Andreessen claims that one of the key economic trends of our time is software eating the world. This means that many services from the analog age are becoming software companies: libraries becoming Google, taxis becoming Uber, and hotel chains becoming Airbnb.

Arbitrators, and maybe more generally legal professionals, are often skeptical about technology eating their lunch (“Right, this can happen to taxi companies… but never to us.”).

They may be (somewhat) right. Technology is unlikely to displace traditional arbitrators from their practice. What is likely to happen is that we will see the arbitration market fragment into different tiers. Arbitrators will still own the top of the pyramid where the high-stakes cases are decided.

But the larger part of the business will lie nearer the bottom of that pyramid, in the adjudication of a high volume of low value claims that historically went under the radar.

As always in history, new institutions arise on the margins - small scale dispute resolution is ready to adapt to this new environment with game theory and humans as intermediaries. This might pave the way for a novel, more equitable vision of justice systems of the future.