Introduction
In August 2025, eight Suffolk Law School students became the inaugural participants in the AAA–Suffolk Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) Innovation Clinic, the centerpiece of a multi-year collaboration among the American Arbitration Association® (AAA®), the AAA-ICDR® Institute, Suffolk University Law School, and justice technology partner Portable.
The project was a joint initiative with the AAA-ICDR Institute, the American Arbitration Association’s thought leadership and innovation arm, focused on the future of dispute resolution, access to justice, legal innovation, and emerging technologies shaping ADR systems worldwide. Through the Clinic, the Institute sought to explore how online dispute resolution and human-centered technology design might help address a persistent challenge: how to make family court, and, in particular, uncontested and lightly contested divorce processes more accessible, understandable, and navigable for self-represented parties.
At the center of the initiative was a simple premise: embedding law students into the justice system to observe the existing process, identify pain points, and design an online dispute resolution platform that would effectively address the needs of parties.
Over the course of the academic year, students spent time inside courtrooms, Registries, mediation sessions, probation offices, and Court Service Centers while simultaneously participating in the development of technology-enabled workflows intended to support uncontested and lightly contested divorce matters in Massachusetts. Together with clinic faculty and Portable’s development team, the students worked on refining Portable’s Civily platform, already in use in Australia, to provide Massachusetts residents with accessible digital pathways that can guide them through emotionally difficult family law processes.
Seeing the System Up Close
Before students could begin building or refining technology, they first had to understand the realities of the existing system.
Throughout the fall semester, students shadowed judges, assistant judicial case managers, registry staff, probation officers, mediators, and Court Service Center attorneys throughout the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court system. They observed SERV sessions, Pathways conferences, motion hearings, mediations, virtual registries, and courtroom proceedings involving both represented and self-represented parties.
The experience quickly revealed how overwhelming the court process can be for people navigating family law matters without legal representation. Students watched litigants carrying stacks of paperwork while trying to determine which forms they needed, where to file them, or why filings had been rejected. They saw long lines form at registries for basic procedural questions. Some litigants misunderstood court notices, while others struggled with interpreter access, procedural terminology, or financial disclosures.
For many students, the observations reframed what “access to justice” actually means. The barriers were not always substantive legal disputes. Frequently, they were procedural, logistical, linguistic, or emotional.
One deficiency notice, issued because two boxes on a filing had not been checked, particularly stood out to the students. Correcting the issue took only moments, yet required additional travel, missed work, and continued stress for the parties.
The students began to understand that friction within a system built around assumed representation is more than an inconvenience. In family law matters, procedural complexity often compounds emotional and financial strain already affecting families during moments of significant transition.
Learning How ADR Changes the Dynamic
The Clinic also exposed students to forms of dispute resolution that looked very different from traditional adversarial litigation.
In SERV sessions, Pathways conferences, and mediation rooms, students observed volunteer attorneys, mediators, and court personnel guiding emotionally difficult conversations involving parenting plans, support obligations, and custody disputes.
The students became increasingly attentive not only to legal outcomes, but to communication styles, emotional pacing, reframing techniques, and conflict de-escalation strategies.
Vivian Phillips reflected on how mediators with social-work backgrounds helped keep difficult conversations productive without escalating tension. In one session, a mediator redirected a heated exchange by focusing the conversation back on a child’s well-being rather than the parents’ grievances against one another.
These experiences reinforced one of the Clinic’s core lessons: effective dispute resolution is not simply procedural; it is deeply human. This perspective shaped many of the students’ technology-design recommendations.
Translating Courtroom Observations into Technology Design
The Clinic’s central innovation component aimed to translate observation into function, allowing students to help design and refine scalable, technology-enabled pathways parties can use to resolve uncontested and lightly contested divorces without the assistance of counsel.
Through the Clinic’s collaboration with the Australian purpose-driven research, design, and technology company Portable, students and court stakeholders explored how Portable’s Civily platform could be customized to support accessible digital divorce workflows and “smart” guided forms for self-represented divorcing parties in Massachusetts.
Students worked directly with Portable’s team to help evaluate how the platform could better reflect the realities they were witnessing inside courtrooms and Court Service Centers in Massachusetts.
In weekly seminar meetings, students worked to translate courtroom observations into practical design decisions. They walked through Massachusetts 1A divorce forms themselves using fictional personas and quickly discovered how easy it was to:
- misunderstand merger and survival clauses,
- incorrectly report weekly income,
- omit assets,
- misunderstand parenting plan provisions,
- or make procedural errors that could delay filings.
These experiences informed many of the students’ recommendations for the Civily workflows and guided interviews.
One recurring design principle involved breaking questions into what students called “single-fact phrases” so users would not accidentally skip important information or misunderstand compound legal prompts.
Students also advocated for:
- plain-language toggles explaining legal terminology,
- “rephrase it” functionality for confusing prompts,
- reflective pauses before major legal commitments,
- embedded explanations of legal consequences,
- trauma-informed screening questions,
- and pathways for live support when users become overwhelmed.
Another recurring theme emerged from observing how poorly court timelines align with the realities of daily family life. KP Hunsinger reflected that “the timeline of litigation (slow) and the timeline of issues in the home (fast) do not align.”
That observation became one of the strongest arguments for asynchronous online dispute resolution systems. Students recognized that parents often cannot afford to miss work, arrange childcare, or spend full days navigating courthouse logistics simply to upload documents or address minor procedural issues.
The students’ work increasingly centered on a larger question: How can technology reduce friction without stripping humanity from emotionally complex disputes? Some design conversations became almost philosophical. How much efficiency is too much when people are reorganizing their families? When should digital systems intentionally slow users down to encourage understanding or reflection?
Those discussions reinforced that the Clinic was not simply digitizing paperwork. It was exploring how dispute resolution systems themselves might evolve.
From Observation to Client Service
By the spring semester, students transitioned from observation and systems mapping into brief service and advice through Court Service Center work and the Clinic’s 1A divorce support efforts.
Students helped clients prepare financial statements, affidavits, child support guidelines, pretrial memoranda, and divorce filings. They also coordinated interpretation services, conducted client interviews, and helped litigants understand procedural next steps.
The Clinic reinforced repeatedly that clients often needed more than forms. They needed clarity, structure, empathy, and reassurance that they were not navigating the system alone.
Reimagining Legal Education and the Future of ADR
By the end of the academic year, the students no longer viewed online dispute resolution as an abstract concept.
They had watched overwhelmed litigants struggle with inaccessible systems. They had helped clients navigate emotionally and procedurally difficult filings. They had participated in iterative technology design conversations with developers and faculty. They had begun exploring what scalable, human-centered dispute resolution systems might actually look like in practice.
The AAA–Suffolk ODR Innovation Clinic is ultimately demonstrating something larger than the success of a single program. It illustrated how ADR institutions, law schools, private enterprise, courts, and local stakeholders can collaborate to rethink and reshape the delivery of legal services in ways that are accessible, efficient, and human-centric.
Supported by the AAA-ICDR Institute’s focus on the intersection between innovation, dispute resolution, and access to justice, the Clinic positioned students not only as future lawyers but as contributors to the future infrastructure of dispute resolution itself.
Portable’s collaboration added another important dimension to the project: demonstrating how technology platforms can evolve through close engagement with local courts and other stakeholders, such as the parties who will ultimately be using the platform, as well as legal educators and ADR professionals. Rather than building technology in isolation, the project embedded iterative design directly within real-world legal environments.
Most importantly, the students left understanding that access to justice is not an abstract policy problem. It’s the parent terrified of filing the wrong form, the litigant unable to miss another day of work, and the self-represented party trying to interpret legal terminology late at night after putting children to bed.
Looking Ahead: The Next Phase of the Collaboration
As the Clinic’s first year concluded, the collaboration among the AAA-ICDR Institute, Suffolk Law, Portable, and court and community stakeholders remains very much in active development. The Civily workflows and guided interviews continue to evolve through ongoing iteration, feedback, and testing informed by the students’ direct observations and client experiences.
The project’s next phase will continue exploring how court-connected online dispute resolution tools, guided workflows, and human-centered design can support self-represented litigants navigating uncontested and low-contest divorces. That includes ongoing refinement of guided interviews, accessibility features, trauma-informed process design, and workflows intended to help litigants complete and understand court forms more accurately and efficiently.
The collaboration also reflects a broader institutional commitment by the AAA-ICDR Institute to convene courts, educators, ADR professionals, and technology partners around scalable approaches to access to justice challenges. Rather than treating technology, legal education, and dispute resolution as separate domains, the Clinic demonstrated the value of bringing them together in a shared design and learning environment grounded in real-world court experience.
And while the technology itself will continue evolving, the Clinic’s core insight remained constant throughout the year: meaningful innovation in dispute resolution begins with understanding the lived realities of the people the system is intended to serve.
About the AAA-ICDR Institute™
The AAA-ICDR Institute is the American Arbitration Association’s® (AAA®) “think and do tank,” focused on shaping the future of dispute resolution. Through applied research, partnerships, and strategic initiatives, the Institute develops practical, evidence-informed solutions in artificial intelligence, access to justice, and court-connected ADR to advance fair, efficient, and accessible dispute-resolution systems.
