Sign Minnesota Arbitration Agreement Fast

Document type sign arbitration agreement minnesota fast

hello everybody this is linda warren ceiling and i am the director of the section of dispute resolution we'll be starting our program at exactly one o'clock i think people are still in one of the educational programs so it may be a few minutes before they jump over to join us sure i wish they'd stop texting me well i will try to make the five o'clock event tonight well i hope you do i hope you do i think it'll be fun i may i may actually um the wood for it's woodford reserve it's in um kentucky and uh they um they make like a premium woodford reserve uh double oak bourbon and what i never realized was oh i see then what i've never realized was that a double oak means that they used two different oak barrels and they aged the bourbon for like twice as long wow if you're a bourbon drinker i think that sounds pretty good it does it really does so now for the event the other night how many people did you end up having for that event i'm thinking about 30. okay yep very nice oh look i don't know if you see the chat but susan guthrie's there and she said oh she learned how to make a great old-fashioned for her father-in-law that's right well steven i can't see you but i i can see you there um people were talking about you last night about your capabilities on using zoom and virtual hearings at the bankruptcy institute sylvia meyer was talking about all the stuff that you do i was really interested somebody else was talking about using zoom for bankruptcy hearings and that there's an expectation that there's going to be a significant number of probably chapter 11 bankruptcies and especially like in the commercial real estate market have you heard anything like that and we actually have a program now a new program if you go to our web page uh it's on the banner uh bankruptcy program we started to help the courts and we've been meeting with judges uh throughout the country and we currently have a really large case right now from uh the texas courts uh you know regarding a bankruptcy so we're expecting a lot and the advantages of using uh outside providers institutions is that we can use any uh system any virtual system um you know the courts are locked in unfortunately to a specific system uh because they have contracts and things like that so and some of them are not that great uh i like i'm not i don't like microsoft skype at all uh i like blue jeans is fine zoom is fine uh but some of the other ones that the court systems throughout the country are locked into are not that great and uh lawyers are complaining about it what was that you said microsoft what uh microsoft skype they purchased skype and yeah and it's a uh it's not awful but it's it's not as good as zoom well i think i think what we're seeing uh-oh where'd y'all go there you are i think what you're seeing is that you're seeing a lot of um private providers starting to step into that that space and one thing that we're hoping we will we will discern from the this expo is where are the holes where is their tech where is there no technology that somebody needs to step in and kind of plug that hole sure sure absolutely yeah no and i think they will be turning to us because the court systems were closed for several months and the backlog is phenomenal it's huge right and it's getting bigger because uh they still are doing obviously social businessing and they're doing promote and they're they're getting more and more backlogged so hopefully we can help and that's what we're here for yeah well my son is a probation officer down in tennessee and i guess he goes to court like three days a week and i mean in the in the in the criminal uh courts the dockets i mean they have 200 they run 200 cases you know every time they're open and you know he's like i don't know how we will ever ever catch up yeah well the small claims court in new york in the southern district turned to triple-a and asked us if we can reach out to our mediators because they have a mandatory mediation program and they're all going to be done on zoom and basically uh you know we contacted all of our mediators across the country uh and a lot of them agreed to help out the new york court system uh with these small claims and they're doing it and they're doing it for free right yeah they're doing it for free yeah and so what i want you to do and folks this is linda celine we'll start the program in just a second is i want you to put together something to send in to the center for pro bono for national celebrate pro bono week i'll send it to you jeff don't worry i'll send it to you um because i think we need to be talking about what mediators and arbitrators do to for access to justice and that's exactly the kind of thing i want us to promote yeah and we do this for storm sandy and for other things uh the civil promotions uh you know cases that we're going to be handling and we've done this uh you know for several years that was not pro bono but it was limited pay yep all right well i'm going to go ahead and get us started hello attendees people are slowly starting to trickle in probably from the program that was from noon until one my name is linda warren sealing i am the director of the section of dispute resolution you are here today with jeff zano and diana didier of the american arbitration association center for international dispute resolution and this keynote presentation is called committed to technological currentness and continuous improvement before we start i want to remind you that you can access all of this program information and other program information in the tech expo hub in a few minutes i will be putting a link to the tech expo hub and a direct and at the direct link to this program into the chat window we want to encourage you to submit questions for the presenters at any time during the program using the q a button in the zoom tool bar there will be uh they will be uh the presenters will be answering questions throughout the program if you need technical support during this program i will also be placing a link to zoom report in the zoom support in the chat don't forget that this program is being recorded and the recording will be posted in the tech expo hub within the next couple of weeks i want to welcome our friend and marketing committee officer for the section of dispute resolution mr jeff zano of aaa icdr and his colleague diana didia the chief information and innovation officer for aaa ipdr and the day's presentation is committed to technological currentness and continuous improvement thank you so much to our presenters you may now begin your program great thank you so much linda and uh thank you for the opportunity to be here um i'm gonna do most of the talking i did ask jeff to join me today i'm the techie and i'm sure you might have some questions that cross over firmly into case management so i may uh punt a few questions to jeff so he's graciously uh agreed to uh be on the panel here with me and if i can interrupt you guys are in for a great treat here with diana she's terrific and i mentioned before we started this program uh how seamless it was when we went remote in march with diana and her team what they did i still can't believe it triple a never shut down and i want to thank diana for that so you've been great thank you thank you jeff thank you very much um all right so jumping in here um i want to give you um a little bit of background first on who i am and what i do um and so from my title i'm the chief information innovation officer and essentially i'm responsible for all technology for the triple a uh including software development and infrastructure so and in in that infrastructure um column is also cyber security um and then i also spearhead our bcp business continuity planning disaster recovery planning crisis management planning those all overlap uh i also we're not very big so i also run facilities in corporate services which has been very interesting as it relates to responding to coven i'll talk a little bit about that as well um but i think what's most important is i report into india johnson the ceo of the aaa um and i sit at the table uh that's a cio's dream um it with the business uh svps um so we really collaborate very closely on strategy um you know and if i need budget to get something done again i'm at the table um and part of those conversations every day which i i think is a really helps us to get a lot of work done which you'll see in the presentation you know just what we're delivering um if you've heard india johnson speaker probably jeff you know these may be familiar to you i just think it gives some context for the whole presentation um what the aaa icdr considers are strategic guideposts if you will um and you know you i'll you know you can see how these relate to technology and to our actual service offerings um you know quality being paramount um you know so that for me that means quite high quality code and ensuring that whatever we're doing has been tested uh as well as it can be you know obviously when you cross the case management um there's a lot more there as relates to our quality of service ease of use um again you can see how that really touches on technology you know everything that we develop our case management resources websites um you know we want to make sure that we're making them as intuitive as possible um and that we're moving any barriers for our customers to utilize the services that we're delivering um options from a case management perspective is you know the flexibility and fee schedules and different ways to pay and all of that and again i need to support all that so you know we're always talking about um you know building different tools or avenues or you know ways for our to interact with our customers um and again you can see how uh we are collaborating with the business on that um knowledge sharing is another aspect um so again we we we produce a lot of websites we'll talk about all of those um making it easy to maintain content to post new and fresh content et cetera expanded presence um we opened an office in singapore um that forgot how long ago that was it seems a long time ago now but not very long ago um and of course technology my team played a big role in that because we had to wire the whole office and talk about the fact that we had a brick and mortar that was on the other side of the world um and then promotion and outreach um and we obviously support our people like jeff in providing analytics and other things and then also you know here i am i'm you know we're out there talking about what we do and how we do it um and i think all of us at the senior bench are playing a role there so those are the strategic objectives um also by way of some background here i wanted to talk about what we consider to be the differentiators of our technology team um so first of all um we really believe in diversity and flexibility of our options so we have many websites um and we have uh very customizable and extendable case management systems um i'll talk a little bit more about that but uh we have very workflow driven case management that can be very tailored to specific caseloads and we really pride ourselves on being able to develop and deliver support and even brand new case loads very quickly so that's something that we really worked on the last several years that it we made it more plug and play um so we can be very responsive and not have to spend a lot of time building something new um so i think that's important in a differentiator um volume and capacity so we have 600 employees about 5500 panelists um 28 permanent i.t staff i think people are always surprised to learn that the aaa has a cio and an i.t department so yeah we have 28 permanent i.t staff we also use a scalable offshore bench so we have a relationship with a um a software development company in india um and you know there's been times when i've been asked to relaunch a couple of websites at the same time and we ramped up to almost 50 people offshore that were helping us do that so um we we have a great relationship long long term almost 10 years now with a group there um it gives us a lot of flexibility in the way that we respond to requests from the business um also um we are very you know we support very high volume case loads our new york state insurance case load is 350 000 cases a year um and so we we can take out a lot of load um we're not afraid of that we have our own data centers co-located in a couple places um we wrangle with almost 250 terabytes of data and we you know we looked it up me and my network engineer and we have about 12 million transactions an hour i mean that's every every you know query we do and phone call we make and you know anybody pressing a stroke on a keyboard uh that interacts with our systems and we could really handle about double that so we're in a we're in a great place there um innovation i think is the differentiator uh we have a formal innovation program so thus the the the additional eye in my name um and what that means is that we have committees we do trainings we have round tables that every staff every level of staff can participate and we're really trying to teach all of our staff to be innovative thinkers and to you know feel comfortable to submit ideas um for improvement whether it be for process or technology um and you know they're really the ones that are interacting with our customers on a daily basis and so we wanted to make sure that we're mining um all of that interaction for good for improvement another differentiator is our cyber security and our bcp um frankly i'm usually asked to talk a lot about that and i've been deployed to talk a lot about that because we have invested many many many hours uh building a very strong cyber security program um and i am going to talk about that uh i did give some meat to that in today's presentation because i think it's really important i'll talk a little bit about what we're doing internally but also you know what we're doing to help our arbitrators and the case process in general um and i mentioned earlier that i am the champion for our bcp and dr we have formal bcp plans um good we did because we leveraged it quite a bit for kovid i'll talk about that um the corollary to that is disaster recovery you know what if we had a cyber attack etc how would we recover again we practice all these we keep the plans current incident response for some sort of security incident same thing we even have crisis management that we practice um with the seniors um you know all tested uh regularly and maintained um and then i think what's uh most another sort of the cornerstone of all this is investment commitment so and what that means is that you know i have to maintain everything we build you know and i have to keep it current uh in order to keep it safe safe and working well and all of that requires sort of a baseline investment um that in today's world can get kind of pricey um in regards to replacing servers and patching and upgrading i don't get any pushback on that you know i think we we are collab you know the mice the seniors and the ceo um they've been on a journey with me in regards to understanding really the intricacies of all of this um and so you know i feel like it's there's a nice healthy floor if you will of what we need to spend every year to make sure that we're staying current and keeping things safe and then you know beyond that we talk about how we can support strategy and innovation all right now getting to sort of the how i described the program is i did want to think about or or talk about um you know all the different technological solutions that the aaa's built and offers and what's coming um and i think that a natural way to bucket those is to talk about um you know digital transformation in general so you know acting on the demand for technology solutions where they didn't exist before and you know automation and things like that um i know a corollary to that is odr or online dispute resolution um a little more narrow very specific to the case management process and i i will take some things out of that digital transformation bucket and talk about those under the odr umbrella um and then how we're responding to cyber security and also privacy uh we'll talk about that or i ll talk about that and then i threw in the coven 19 response um really i think the rest of these the digital transformation the odr and the privacy really sort of inform what we're doing with covid um you know it readied us for needing to respond there but um i do want to talk about some very specific things related to covid and our response all right starting with digital transformation um this is just a quick summary of really all the tools and services that we support um and in a good i would the majority really have been custom built by the it team and we do use some sas solutions we have one i'll talk about for our case management we use uh off-the-shelf software for finance and hr email you know we use outlook but things that are specific to our services really are things that we've built ourselves um and we're very practicing a lot of different technologies and we have that offshore group so if we need to roll on a particular type of programmer and roll off somebody else that gives us the flexibility to do that which is great because then we can build some cool stuff because we don't have to have all of that talent um sitting on our bench all the time um but as far as enterprise systems go we have an internal system we call prism um the that's our main case management system for all of our arbitration construction you know employment and consumer arbitrations and mediations um the front end of that you know is the ecenter and web file tool which i'm going to give you guys a little uh sneak peek of you probably maybe several people on the phone are familiar with it um really all the same tool just just a version for our staff and then aversion for customers we use a tool by tyler technology sas tool called a cloud sas tool called adr center we use that for our new york state insurance the high volume mass claims caseload that we do there um and that has some specific things to high volume that they were suited to do a little bit better than us um when you're talking about like 350 000 cases a year but we have extensive interfaces to them as far as document uh indexing and so forth um we we do use automation uh we have some automation in-house where we have workflow bots mainly in that new york state insurance caseload that are rippling through and doing things faster um you know making adjustments to certain cases um that would they're doing it much faster than our staff could do um and then we have a custom built mass claims indexing tool um you know almost all the stuff that comes into new york state insurance really heavy uh document management uh x-rays uh you know tons of medical records and you know that we have a whole team of indexers that are in a particular tool um that help them to break those out and label those documents and get them ready for arbitrator review um so that's our enterprise systems we have uh what is this about five or six corporate with corporate websites um those are the main face of the triple a to uh you know anybody any of our customers panelists um adr.org we have icgr.orgmediation.org we have a foundation the foundation has its own website new york state insurance has a page we have an education site um maybe the most interesting part of the slide is this case management resources these ones in bold i am going to go into some screenshots as we go along and try to give you some little tidbits of what we built i won't go through them all we could be here all day but um web file and panelistic center are big i'll talk more about those under the adr umbrella because i'm i'm starting with digital transformation um we do have multiple ways to pay invoices um quick pay i'll show you that or just where you find that multiple ways to file we have something called fast file and we you could also do that on webfile there's a lot of tools listed here uh i think another interesting piece is we do have ways multiple ways for individuals that are looking for arbitrators or mediators to search for them we have these things called search tools which are deployed in the middle of the case management process where they can search resumes themselves uh you know they can search for mediators on our mediation uh aaa mediation.org site we have energy arbitrator list of mega panel we are always thinking about ways to um you know allow the our customers to search uh across our panel records um themselves um some interesting recent digitization highlights we've done a lot of web analytics work i'm going to show you some of that because i think it's really interesting um we have tons of group filings coming in um this is all in the employment and consumer um 20 000 30 000 cases filed at the same time and we got to get all that into our prism system and we've been building uh automation around that um so that it's not doesn't take so long and it doesn't require so much staff to be able to do that um we did in the last i think a couple years now i've launched resumes uh video resumes um for uh the arbitrator meteors can record a video and we we have that accessible through all the different places that customers can search them we just launched ach panelist compensation that was really underway anyway and then we pushed fast because of coven um so that was a relatively new thing and then we've launched some new mobile apps um one's already live one is like at this moment going live and i'll talk about those two too i think i mentioned those under the odr umbrella uh let's see next slide here um just now i'm gonna go into just a couple of uh screenshots accessing case resources on adr.org this is such a screenshot of adr.org and here's the file or access your case if you click on this you get to a page where you can see the fast file a case that really is like almost like sneakernet an email and you can attach documents and we you know do the busy work then of reaching out to you to get everything else we need um quick pay you just need uh you know your invoice will have a code on it just like you pay medical bills you can do it that way um but you also can log in more formally to our aaa web file tool and then e-center which i'll give you an overview when we get to uh the odr section i was just just wanted to highlight where these like quick and uh quick pay and fast file are um they're sort of in the same spot that you would log into ecenter um one of the case management tools resource tools that i mentioned was clause builder um you can access access this from the bottom of adr.org or icdr.org in the footer you'll see clause builder if you search clause builder um and this is a tool that really we built this because uh a question that our case staff our legal team that we get a lot is you know wanting guidance as to uh you know if they're trying to they're trying to write their arbitration clause um and you know especially the more complicated ones when it gets to you know various types of options that you want to build in um you know we we felt like we would we're it's hard to keep up with all that and to be as responsive as we could so we built a tool that'll walk you through step by step and help you to build uh build your claws um this also addresses that quality aspect i mean again if if the clause is really poorly written i'm sure several of you know online then you know that could be um that may not be enforceable and we don't want that so um you know i think we were we were very uh pleased to launch this this has been there for uh we've had it for a bit but i did want to point out that this is the starting building clause page and you know starting to get to the options number of arbitrators etc you can store the locally the clause i did want to point out that we constantly update this tool so we just gave it a facelift cleaned it up a bit um but we're updating it because different things materialize like there was the sedona principles about e-discovery um and we started getting questions again about how do you integrate that into your arbitration clause um and then i'll hear from the business that we need to make adjustments to this tool to address that and so um you know it's it isn't a one and done this is a very organic tool that you know gets a lot of care and feeding as needed diana correct me if i'm wrong but that is that is our most hit site is that correct yes it is yeah our clients love it and and i love it as a vp in new york where i get calls like you said all the time about clauses it's a great tool um and then i wanted to show you just as a i was trying to figure out a way to introduce the analytics but i think on the heels of clause builder it's a good way to do it um so we have a tableau internally and a data warehouse and we have the last few years really been pushing to build a lot of uh analytic tools all aggregated data you know we're not we're not i'm gonna get to talking about privacy so we're not talking about what an individual did but the clause builder tool um understanding which options people are building in uh when they're building a clause really sort of telegraphs to us the future of adr right at least in one way sliver um and so we we really are looking at and analyzing you know the different options that people are building in the classes and so we give this to jeff and my colleagues and and you know they they can uh be informed by that um and this is another version of the clause builder analytics dashboard um you know showing you the options that were selected um and then we do do that as well i mentioned these search tools that we we've built um and again if you've been an advocate with us lately on a case um you know especially the large complex ones you know we'll issue a link the case manager gives you a link um to uh you know a small search tool that allows you to browse through all the resumes of our panelists and search a bunch of different ways um and we're always curious then i mean again there's lots of good data there as to what are people looking for is in their arbitrators you know what are they searching on um you know by practice area et cetera and we have different versions of that search tool we have mediator we have you know for the different international one and we have a dashboard for each of those so um you know again it does start to inform um you know that helps us with our relationship with our panelists because we know now what customers are looking for um and it helps us uh build our panel because we can look at different skills and you know what they're what they're searching uh you know what criteria they're looking for in an arbitrator or a mediator um and then last under this umbrella of digitization um you know it's all really about getting access to information that was not accessible before um and this is just an interesting little somewhat esoteric one like we buried on adr.org if you go to the consumer page you'll see this consumer clause registry um and uh consumers can search you know anybody that has a um a consumer arbitration clause where they name the aaa they they are required to register it with us and then we give transparency to uh customers consumers that that clause exists um and so this page you get to when you click there um and then you know they can see the company and then they can click through and they see the details of the arbitration clause and so that's just an example of you know without websites and digitization you know you can't have that much be harder to be that transparent um and i was just showing you an example that you may not have been familiar with before all right so now i'm going to move on to the next um i'm now an odr i pick these little cute icons here to keep it straight a lot of so much content um but wanted to talk about online dispute resolution um really we see that as an extension of the digital transformation activities um there has been a covered push we all know this to do more things online um i am going to end when i talk about covid talking about virtual hearings and our support there so i won't do that right this second um i want to show you web file in e-center so uh web file is our these are these are the the case management main case management tools for you know basically commercial construction you know all the everything but new york state insurance um for both for our customers um and you know we joke that we should have called them like web file youth center platform because we hear a lot about somebody needs to be able to build a platform where you can share documents and manage cases online and we're like we have that it's called web file and each center uh e-center being for the panelists um and we've talked a lot about driving adoption of those tools um and we're constantly talking about ways to improve them um and they they gotta relaunch recently they look beautiful um but you know as far as the document management piece there's a lot of our process is mixed in there you know how we index documents you know what can be posted just by the customers versus having the a case manager need to be in the middle of posting something sometimes there's sensitive things there like requests to remove an arbitrator or request uh you know um where they need some sort of financial relief you know we wouldn't want necessarily the arbitrator seeing those um but i do have some thoughts about how we're trying to take the case manager out of there and allow you allow customers to share documents just more freely because we believe that is hindering adoption a little bit um buried in web file is an online settlement tool we don't have it turned on for all cases i think right now it's on for minnesota and consumer case loads but i'll show you what it looks like and you know really my colleagues just need to tell me to turn it on when they want to turn it on um we are uh continuously looking at panelists resources uh including resume management some improvements there i'll walk you through that um we have an administrator assistant logon coming um not live yet but live before the end of the year where an arbitrator or mediator could have their administrator have their own credentials and log into eccentric and see things related to the arbitrator when we're that sort of overlaps with cyber security we didn't really like the arbitrators sharing their credentials so we built a different way um and then i'm going to talk about the mobile apps here um we also launched a uh we have online scheduling for minnesota no fault uh you know the there the arbitrators put in their availability um and then the system actually you know looks at their availability and matches it with you know the next hearing and you know automatically schedule stuff and that had a huge uptake uh even before covid with the minnesota no fault to caseload um so that's something again that once we build it for once case load we can look at where that might make sense other in other places um also you know firmly in odr or aaa mediation.org if you're not familiar with it um you know the folks that go there and search for mediators can have direct access to mediators we're not in the middle of that they basically can contact those mediators um and you know look to engage them uh directly without the aaa having to be involved um and then also with odr i am going to talk about some stuff we're doing with blockchain um and it related to that we did start uh you know toying around with using smart contracts for self-service um this is this elusive how much more can we just uh you know a case that could happen without uh you know case managers being involved um there's not a concrete deliverable there yet but it's just something that we are um you know playing around with and you know may come in the future um all right so continuing under odr then just kind of keeping with my model some screenshots here this is the basically the home page of webfile filing a case um and so here you are in as a customer or advocate and you can see the options to the left um again if you this is just i'm going to say 18 months old maybe jeff i can't remember if you haven't been in there in a few years you definitely should check it out because i i think it is i think you're right 18 months yeah um so this is the file a case page um you know once you're in there you get a list f all of your cases um you know it's got some cool stuff like these little red flags that you know something new that needs your attention um you know everything is is filterable and sortable and you know a lot of uh neat uh features and and uh tools built in um you know here now you're digging you're looking at one particular case um you know and you can go through the tasks events you know documents et cetera um here is uh the case documents area um and again i'm going to be talking about sort of another area that we're going to add that's more exhibits focused because this right now is like you know all of the case administration related documents um and we wanted to give something that again was a little freer in how you could share exhibits and we'll get to that but this is what it looks like right now and you can do some flagging yourself you know almost like an outlook of things that you want to remember to take a look at um here's invoices um and again this is you could pay invoices here but you could also pay in that quick pay without logging into anything if you didn't want to come in here um but you're if you're doing you know working um either you know a large complex case or if you got more than one case with us you know this would you know be a dashboard for you for looking at all of your uh your invoices i mentioned the online settlement tool so here it is so um and again we have this turned on for those couple of case loads um but generally it it is then available within the case record basically um and sort of pre-populates for you you know what is being uh what the claims are um and then really what it's doing is facilitating a back and forth of offers um you know where you can not have to be on the phone doing that and you can contemplate it at your own time um it's not doing any sort of algorithmic uh at the moment any third algorithmic agreeing on the on the um on the the amount to settle um it's really facilitating a back and forth and keeping a history of that back and forth until there's a settlement reached and then e-center is the is sort of a sister application to web file and this is for our panelists um it has a very similar look and feel um when they come in here to the home page if they are both an advocate in a panel they can switch you know they can go back and forth within one log on um you know where it differs is because this is helping to manage our panel um you can see that you know there's an area where we give some communication to the panel um and you know there's the links to education and training there's actually some information security stuff which i'm going to talk about in our security area um you know it but generally it has you know all their cases um and uh oh it has an area to update their resume um it to note here if you update your resume and e-center it's updated everywhere for the aaa that's another thing that we spent a lot of time doing um over the last couple years was to make it so that if you update it once you never need to update it again so it'll be right on mediation.org it'll be right in all of our arbitration search tools it's right in prism if a case manager is sending out the pdf it is one record and you can update it through the online tool and be assured that it's consistent everywhere and then still under this odr um the mobile our new mobile apps that we launched um the rules app is already live um so this is um you know simply a tool where you can look at uh you know pretty static information and then we you know we update it if it needs to be updated but it's like a quick reference for standard arbitration clause and a quick reference for um various tools um can you pause one second there's a lot of noise outside my window excuse me let me just don't do that and then i have a quick question for you diana about the uh the mobile app and whether or not but the good thing is diana we can't hear it i know it's probably distracting to you i'm sorry i'm sorry i couldn't hear myself think there but the good thing is we couldn't hear it that's the good thing a quick question about about the app i love the app uh and i use it all the time now since the pandemic and i have it on my ipad my iphone uh is it iphone is it for iphones androids or multiple sources yep yeah it is for multiple devices yeah okay because i it is a great thing so in the audience please you should download that if you work with aaa it's phenomenal all right so that is the uh the app that's already live the new app that is coming imminently i it's either i mean it's literally this week next week there's going to be some announcement of it is the east center mobile app um so this is for panelists um and this is uh actually allowing the panelists to take care of certain things right there on their mobile device so they can look at their cases look at events they can do some task work you know so it just like apps typically are it's a subset of you know all the features and functions that are in e-center but we did have you know a committee of panelists that helped us to really sort of narrow down um what we think um you know is doable and what they would want in a on a small device versus logging into the website um so we're pretty excited about this and then you know the next one would be a web file mobile app um and we'll have to determine if there's really a need for that if there is we'll build it and again um as part of that innovation our formal innovation program we do have focus groups that we convene um to try to help give us give us input on either you know not should we even do this project and then once we start you know trying to give us feedback on the on the particulars if you will um all right so that was odr um i now want to talk about uh cyber security uh so i'll move into that um on cyber security uh the aaa really we've thought of it as sort of two areas of focus uh the first area was our own systems and our employees um and that was sort of you know the basics that everybody was addressing you know going back several years now um and we took a very formal approach um i'm going to go into the details about that um in in making sure that we were really protecting all of the sensitive data that we were taking on in our systems and you know that our employees deal with um and then we felt like we got pretty good at that you know not good you know that it's never perfect uh it takes a lot of care and feeding but you know we have staff that are dedicated to um we have some vendors involved you know we have a ca we have a strong competency there um and so then where we pivoted was more towards case participant focus and this has been just the last 18 to 24 months where we really said you know what we need to be doing a little bit more to share all of this knowledge that we've learned with our panelists with our customers and really helping to move the needle on case level cyber security and and i know there's a lot of arbitrators that i'm on a lot of panels with there's a lot of people who are very focused on this which is great um and then you know we just wanted to jump in that fray because we feel like we've got a lot of good knowledge to share and that because we're in the middle of the process you know it's really it's really part of our should really be part of our mission and our role to help uh with the integrity of uh case in general so i'll talk about some initiatives that we have going on in that bucket as well so starting with the employee systems focus cyber security um we have we use the nist cyber security framework it's the government's cyber security framework um we measure ourselves against that use like a checklist uh we have a formal information security and privacy committee um that's comprised of me representation from uh legal from human resources and from the business um so that's just to make sure that you know i'm wearing these separate you know similar i'm wearing duplicate hats you know i run technology and i also running security um and to sort of keep me honest you know i really wanted to run it as a committee so that i've got other people uh looking over what we do and how we're measuring ourselves et cetera um i mentioned all the plans we have in place in regards to bcp um our staff go through extensive security awareness training we also mock phish our staff that means that we're sneaky we send out emails and try to get them to click on links um that in theory would you know could have malware in them um and we measure them and they they really they're really skeptical because they don't like showing up on a list they show up in a list if they fail and the ceo knows and it's um you know we think it's been a great way to really make um them really thoughtful about uh the way that they are managing data and also you know emails and not clicking on things just willy-nilly um we have a very rigorous policy portfolio you know we update it every year on regards patch management clean desk acceptable use of technology and again our staff are used to all these things um and we use enterprise grade protections back to that investment commitment um you know we we have you know best in class firewall we have a managed security service provider that monitors our firewall 24 7. will wake me and others up in the middle of the night if they see something funny going on um so we have a lot of really good protections there and we do measure ourselves regularly we have an audit committee as part of our governance structure organizationally i report to the audit committee on pen tests vulnerability scans risk assessments so you know they're another oversight all right and then lastly as it relates to employee and system security here's where i'm going to dig in a little bit is about security and privacy by design so almost everything i mentioned up until now here is about infrastructure you know the the sort of the nuts and bolts and key pieces of locking the doors to your house but another piece of security in privacy is your applications and your data so security by design i'll just touch on that that's making sure that when we develop code and websites they also go through reviews and there's like best practices to make sure that you're not putting in a vulnerability in your website that allows somebody to walk through your firewall um also multi-factor authentication and things like that getting baked into any tool that we're launching for external use um now privacy by design is the one i'm going to dig into even more now so um we did do a gdpr sort of assessment i mean when that was launching um you know there's not really yet you know you can't be gdpr compliant you know it doesn't really it hasn't gotten there yet but there was a lot of guidelines in there that we wanted to make sure you know we have icdr that we were adhering to you know we did the basic stuff cookie banners on our websites but we also created a very thorough privacy by design program and i i will want to talk to you about what that means and what that is um so the privacy by design basics are when we're dealing with data and this can be you know data we collect when somebody registers on one of our websites um registers for a an event with us um if you know about our panelists our panelists resumes you know anything that where we're you know related to our processes that we're only collecting the data that is needed that we limit access to the data to those who need it that we delete the data once it is no longer needed and the control of personal data belongs with the owner with the person so those are the privacy by design basics there as part of the process there's something called a data protection impact assessment so this was outlined by gdpr um and we created our own process around that and you know what the components of it need to be and essentially it means that there's sort of a big form that needs to be filled out that asks a ton of questions when you're going to collect new data um and you know the that our information security and privacy committee then reviews that and makes sure that we're not doing something we shouldn't do or that if we are sharing you know we're we in what ways are we going to let the individual be in charge of their own data um and so you know a good test of this recently was um california there was a california start statute that required us to quarterly report on a set of diversity um uh attributes about our users about panelists that that included some data we were already collecting but data we had never collected before um and some of it's sensitive like you know your um yeah some of the sensitive information about that you wouldn't normally qual you know think that they would request uh as part of diversity sexual orientation being one as an example um and you know i think in years past we would have said oh well we gotta do it california says we have to do it right are we doing it ju you know and we're gonna follow whatever the statute is um but this time we filled out a data impact uh assessment um and we really looked at you know how we were going to store it and the way that they could opt out and we even got into you know how visible is that how intuitive is that um and making sure that we have the right communications going out to the panelists that as we were collecting this information and then ultimately again the panelists have the control if they want to you know uh have this information not submitted at all or have the information deleted they could they could do that um another aspect of the privacy by design is limiting state staff access to case records um so uh we call this data viewing privileges and back in the old days you know we had out of our 600 employees you know 400 some odd or case staff and they would go into the case management system and of course they were working on their cases but they could see you know every case in there if they wanted to and we we started we it's a few years old now we took this more hipaa approach we said you know what no you if you don't you're not working on those cases you don't need to see them um and so we have ways to limit the number of eyeballs by status by intake pending or closed cases by division and location and you know just using division and access to icdr cases can go from 300 plus staff that could see them to fewer than 40 staff members that could see those cases just using division and then we also have something called high profile cases um you know so we do have cases for you know actors politicians uh you know athletes um you know or some high profile case in general you know there were the parties it's been in the news we really want to do extra protections on those um and so we really lock them down and we can take an employment case involving a well-known athlete access can go from 75 plus staff to 10 or fewer really we can keep it to the vp the case manager and the svp are the only ones that could see it in our uh our case management system um so that's another aspect of privacy by design we also purge case documents and do data anonymization um so most documents are purged 18 months after closing um we are this is the data anonymization is relatively new that did also come out of gdpr um so we're looking at um you know older data that we documents we were always purging but case record information um you know we were keeping a lot of that because you know we looked for conflict checking you know off you know things conflict checking related arbitrators um you know award data and now we're we're really got a little more sophisticated as to what pieces of a case record we're going to anonymize and then keep the record there if we still want to have at least you know like say the award that might be interesting from an analytics perspective in the future um and then managing exceptions i mean obviously we have to be careful that if there's you know we have a legal hold on something we can't do any of this uh if there's money due and there's some variable settings we need to be a little more a little sophisticated there but uh but we are purging and anonymizing records um all right then the moving on so that was all things related to our internal security so those are things we're doing to protect he data and um you know the records that we take ownership of in our systems and then our staff deal with um now this is the i want to talk about that other focus uh where i said we were turning around our learnings and talk about the case participant focused cyber security um you gotta hang with me here because there's so much content sorry but we think of this in two buckets so we had two buckets to begin with now we got two sub buckets um under this case participant focused cyber security we think of it as arbitrator security so arbitrator mediator sorry i should say that um and that is the security of their own devices and their own behavior so you know this is their laptop their phone you know their email and how we can influence that so that's one aspect of this case participant focus cyber security and then there's something we've been calling security within the context of a case and that is about the process itself like all of the sharing of documents and retention and um you know you've got a lot of players working together um so if you assume they've got good baseline security with the devices they're using you know what's left in regards to helping them to secure the process and now i'll talk about that too so the arbitrator cyber security initiatives this is back to their personal devices our trainer mediator their personal devices um we have a cyber security basics checklist that's on adr.org um if you're a panelist with us there's an ace course you may have heard my voice before it's me on there going through very detailed tips of things you could be doing with your laptop um ensuring um in your email et cetera vpn and everything the basics you need to do to ensure that you're practicing good basic cyber hygiene um we uh we are doing hand we were before coveted hands-on training sessions so with for our panelists we actually started down the road of bringing them in in small groups you know 20 something at a time and my help desk staff were on hand to actually help them make settings on their own personal devices you know turn on the firewall turn on the uh full disk encryption um you know enable vpn you know actually make changes to their device um and we just thought we were ready to do that countrywide it was going to be an initiative for the last next 24 months we were going to try to touch every arbitrator that wanted to come in for free included in their panel fee um and then covet hit we did about four or five of them and then copenhagen um so we have been doing some sessions virtually it's more of a tip session than it can be obviously we we can't virtually be adjusting people's machines in any efficient way but hopefully we'll be able to pick that back up um we did launch a new cyber security and technology page on adr.org i'll show you that trying to you know make it one place you could go to get some stuff there's an education services uh cyber security awareness training course and certificate for panelists again on our education services site uh also for panelists there's an east center security tips and training page i'll show that and then this is a big one this last bullet i'm not live yet but we're in the middle of a pilot um with something that we're calling case shield by triple a um and this is a virtual cloud-based desktop where our arbitrators and panelists could um subscribe to a service where they actually are working in the cloud you know so they have a new email cloud in the cloud that has enterprise level protections around it um and a desktop where they could use office 365 and save documents and all of that instead of saving it locally and worrying about keeping their um their desktop uh you know all updated all the time they could actually work in this virtual environment um and be assured that there's protections there especially against ransomware and you know breaches of their email which we do see a lot as it relates to arbitrators and mediators with their personal devices and their personal email account um so those are all the ways that we're talking about trying to help arbitrators and and mediators um this is the new page on adr.org so now on the top level navigation there's something called cyber security and technology if you click in there um you'll see that there's a section called cyber security and data protection good stuff out there including summaries of our business continuity plan summaries of our security program best practice guides you know a lot of good stuff there um this talks about clicking here and this will talk about how we're managing uh technology disputes um and the expertise we have on our panel and then this talks about um you know the overlap again web file and e-center they don't just play a role for odr they play a big role for cyber security in the in you know ensuring people are sharing documents online versus using a thumb drive or something so that's mentioned there as well and then this is the panelist e-center security tips and training page that i mentioned this is relatively new this is an e-center here in the left nav and it's got some cool like micro trainings like little videos um on how to do certain things um some of these are trainings we put our own staff through so we've just turned them around and given them to our panelists and some we've created ourselves that are like how to's um as it relates to you know turning on encryption and some of those things we were doing uh in the panelists uh the boot camps that we can't do right now so we've made some videos and you know when we create documents that are like tip sheets and stuff we're trying to put them here in this information security tips section um so that the arbitrators and panelists have them in one spot all right so that was all about again arbitrator panelist security uh you know with their own devices etc assuming that's all taken care of now we move on to security within the context of a case um and what are we doing here um we did create a best practice guide um as it relates to um again an arbitrator or a mediator you know looking at trying to get the all the case participants to agree on some best practice uh measures you know again talking about what email are we all using what is our case retention going to be um you know how are we sharing documents and um that guide is now sent to every arbitrator when they're appointed so they have it um and also we've integrated into that workflow the workflows in our present prism system um several touch points that mentioned explicitly cyber security in various communications again like on appointment um and you know with confirmation of hearings and things like that to try to spur along making the arbitrator raise these um concerns and for the case participants to start a dialogue about them so you know we're not i get asked a lot like why not require certain things i think we're appreciative we want to be right on the edge and be pushing people to improve um we don't want to drop to being so um uh restrictive that you know we're hindering really the you know a case being able to proceed so we're trying to to not just accept the status quo but sort of push the status quo a little bit forward um by at least trying to make sure that all these conversations are occurring um and we're giving our staff a lot more training and awareness around how to answer questions about cyber security that come up in this context like again not just about not clicking on a phishing email but about how they might be able to answer or help an arbitrator uh to facilitate uh document sharing or something that the arbitrator might have a question of and then i mentioned a few slides back that i would be talking about this new section that's coming uh coming soon on our panelist e-center and web file um and this is this we're calling it the hearing exhibit space um so this is different than the regular case uh file that's there the electronic case folder um where again the because there's admin documents in there the case manager is sort of in the middle um this would be fully self-service it allows identification of a joint exhibits there's a multi-file drag and drop so that you you know again i think case the other case docket right now is only one at a time um and it accommodates very large files uh up to 75 megabytes so that's coming soon and that came out of all of our feedback around panelist and e-center and web file adoption um and again i put both my icons here because i think it covers both security and um uh and the uh odr um i want to hurry up because i'm realizing that i've got about five minutes left yeah can i talk can i toss you one question we have a couple of questions all just so we don't run out of time uh diana do most clients file electronically and i'm not sure if i can answer that i i think it's like sixty percent that sounds about right it's not as high as we would like it you think we could get it to like 90 or something that's one of those things where we've said should we make it required but i think around 50 or 60 is about right yeah and i've been i'm assuming it has increased since the pandemic i hope it has so i i don't know the numbers i think pre-pandemic you're right sixty percent so yeah all right do you wanna okay yeah you to take one more question uh what disability accessibility audits do you do oh interesting um we are we just completed a um well we're in the process of completing a full audit of all of our websites as it relates to the ada regulations um and and so we're looking at you know color contrast and you know ability to hook into tools for speech to text all of that um we are we've undertaken you know a thorough review of all of our web properties and we were just literally the other day looking at you know what came back as gaps and there would be a plan in 2021 to start closing those gaps great thanks um all right so i'll just tell you what else is in the deck i think everybody's going to get access to it i i did talk about a new voting system that we're building that's going to be blockchain enabled so the actual integrity of the vote we're going to store on the blockchain and so we do elections for unions and you know other associations and you know that's what these slides are about it's really our first uh we're doing learnings about blockchain because we know that's something that can impact um the way that arbitrations are done in the future i believe in you know eating dog food meaning like if you learn to play with these tools we're better able to sit at the table then and talk about how they might um you know impact adr and odr um so here's a tool that we're building that is actually going to have some blockchain overlap and then our covert response you know we we talked about um jeff talked about how quickly we opened our offices you know 95 percent of our staff retained you know working from home we got everybody all set um we are trying to reopen our offices or at least have them ready to be you know have in-person hearings or hybrid hearings in the northeast in october um numbers are low we have some you know we're hanging signs and doing all that stuff i mean who knows if they really will be used or if the you know the coveted numbers will stay low enough but just know that we're very focused on that taking a very careful risk and compliance approach um there is a covid resource center in adr.org um if you right here in the in the uh one of the boxes on the home page uh cova resource center and virtual hearings covered resource center um has a bunch of stuff that is useful including learning about our hearing facilities and the status of them and then the last thing if i just got a minute i will talk about virtual hearing support so virtual hearings through the roof um i think where i was trying to look at stats quickly i think 600 some odd virtual hearings last couple weeks alone um so the uptake on them been thousands of them since we started with covid we do have this is on our website virtual hearing guides um and i think what's really useful here is we did go through looking at zoom for example in all the settings that you need to do um to have them turned on to use zoom in a safe way um and we have internally trained what we call champions that can host these virtual hearings that are familiar with all these different tools not just zoom made it to the last slide look at you good job that is so impressive what you guys have done amazing work yeah a lot of really good work it's it's fun it's fun too yeah yeah we're happy for the collaboration with my colleagues wonderful well thank you so much diana and jeff for this absolutely fascinating um presentation uh chris draper real quickly asked about what blockchain network are you using uh you thank you diana um so uh attendees we want to thank you for being here today uh if you'll look in the chat there's a link to the evaluation form please we're asking you please to fill those out we really appreciate it next up is an exhibit hall break yes there's a link to the exhibit hall where you can go and meet with exhibitors during the break we encourage you to do that um and this evening i'd like to invite you at five o'clock uh we will have a tour of the whirligig brewery and then immediately following that we will go straight into our final reception and happy hour sponsored by rdo thank you again to diana and jeff uh you guys can log off i'm going to leave the room open for a few minutes for those people who need to access the links and thank you so very much to triple a icdr who is also a sponsor for our expo great thank you so much linda and terrific job diana thank you bye-bye have a wonderful week well i'll see you tonight for linda excellent okay