VirtualCourthouse.com® History

VirtualCourthouse.com® History

 

VirtualCourthouse, LLC (“VCHâ€) was founded in 2001 to provide new exceptional and compelling dispute resolution technologies to the mediation, legal, insurance, business, courts and other institutional communities. One goal has remained at the forefront – providing fast, efficient and effective methods to resolving disputes—removing barriers to a fair, fast and inexpensive dispute resolution.

VirtualCourthouse.com®(VCH) is a leading provider of online dispute resolution (ODR) technologies and Internet processes. VirtualCourthouse.com has resolved over 1,000 disputes. VirtualCourthouse.com has been featured on Fox and ABC News and was awarded the American Bar Association Louis Brown Award for Legal Access in 2009.  

 

VCH is an Internet-based service that enables parties to submit disputed claims, responses and supporting material in digital form for resolution by a neutral provider (mediator or arbitrator) of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) services.  These ADR services can include arbitration, mediation, neutral case evaluation or a settlement conference by members of a panel of neutrals – often retired judges or industry experts. VCH creates a marketplace by recruiting the neutrals, administering the electronic case file, and providing access to the system by the legal and claims community including insurance staff counsel, claims agents and the parties.  The service allows customers to track cases and provides management reporting and oversight to institutional customers such as insurance companies, dispute resolution organizations and courts. 

The VCH Dispute Resolution Platform (DRP) is a combination of multimedia technologies and business processes, integrated with a customer-friendly user interface.  The DRP replicates and improves the current process of dispute resolution in an online environment, removing constraints of time and distance.  The platform is a sequence of events utilizing Internet-based media technologies that is designed to resolve conflicts between two or more parties.  The DRP enables the resolution of disputes by functioning as a middleware to connect the disparate business processes of attorneys, claimants, respondents and neutrals. It permits the exchange of data between these business processes, which would otherwise lack the technology interfaces essential to working together electronically.

  

The DRP resides between the parties and their representatives’ desktop applications and a client’s document management system.  Attorneys, representatives and private dispute resolution personnel share a common interest in promoting efficient linkages between each other’s offices. Though attorneys generate the paper flow, dispute resolution personnel expend great human and financial resources in managing the paper, administrative, and financial business processes.  Documents received must be time stamped, filed, and made accessible to interested parties.  Despite this shared interest in the document flow, the data management systems of the attorneys and dispute resolution neutrals are currently independent entities.  A middleware product, like the DRP, is critical to enabling the creation of efficient document and information sharing between unrelated

entities.  The platform, centralized through VirtualCourthouse.com is the electronic “glue†that binds these users of otherwise unrelated systems into a virtual private data and business process network.

 

The Internet creates an online marketplace for dispute resolution by bringing together parties with disputes and neutrals seeking a storefront for their services. Members of the public, the disputants, will be able to visit the “virtual†court at all hours, review the docket and participate in any proceedings under way. Lawyers, their assistants and the parties case managers will be able to check on the status of their cases, view documents and make filings at any time.  The Company will look to serve the global market by enhancing the DRP further by providing multi-lingual services.