Adjudication or Litigation?

How To Choose Your Best Option

The enormous cost, delay and disruption of contentious litigation is universally scorned – and the only people who recommend it are the litigation lawyers who profit from it.  But until now, litigation often was seen as the only viable option for resolving difficult legal disputes. Even though another option is now available, the human impulse to choose the “devil we know” is very powerful. Below is an analytical process that we recommend to help you decide whether Comprehensive Adjudication would be a better choice:

• COST:  Ask any reputable litigation attorney to provide you with a detailed written budget for litigating your dispute in the public court system – a budget that places a cap on the maximum fees the attorney will charge to litigate the dispute to a final conclusion. Then ask whether the attorney will cut that number in half.  Most litigation attorneys will be unwilling to cap their fees.  None will cap their fees at 50 percent. But CASES can guarantee that your share of the neutral Adjudicator’s fees for vigorously investigating and deciding your dispute will be no more than half the cost of public court litigation – and probably much less.
• TIMELINE:  Next ask your litigation attorney to provide you with a written timeline guaranteeing the maximum amount of time required to litigate your dispute to a final conclusion in the public court system.  Then ask whether the attorney will cut that number in half.  No attorney will do that. But CASES can and will make sure your case is decided in no more than half the time required to litigate it.
• EXPERTISE:  Also ask whether you will be able to interview the public court judges available in your jurisdiction to assess their biases, objectivity, diligence and integrity – and then select one that has expertise in the specific area of law at issue in your dispute. You will be told that you will have to live with a judge that is randomly assigned to your case – even if the judge’s entire prior experience was in another area of the law.  However, if you choose Comprehensive Adjudication, CASES will provide you with potential Adjudicators who each have expertise in the subject of your dispute – and you will be able to jointly interview the candidates before selecting one that all parties believe to be highly qualified to investigate and decide who should prevail.
• CAREFUL OBJECTIVE ANALYSIS:  A litigation attorney may try to persuade you that your interests cannot be well served by a neutral Adjudicator who diligently finds the law and facts supporting the positions of all parties to the dispute before deciding the case.  But ask whether there is any scientific analysis proving that judges and juries are consistently able to draw reliable conclusions out of the competing factual spins of the dueling attorneys in an adversarial process.  The problem with retaining a zealous advocate is that your opponent has one too.  Perhaps it would be better to decide the dispute based upon careful objective analysis.
• ANALYZING YOUR OPTIONS:  The non-profit organization, Intelligent Justice, has an analysis that weighs the pros and cons of Comprehensive Adjudication vs. Public Court Litigation vs. Traditional Arbitration vs. Mediation. Click here to review the Intelligent Justice analysis.