In this episode, Ian speaks with Colin Rule, CEO of ODR.com, about the upcoming ODR2026.org conference taking place on June 11, 2026 (also surrounded by other events on June 10, June 12 (the Arbitration and Mediation in the Age of AI conference) and the VibeODR.com hackathon on June 13th).

For more information about the conference, visit http://odr2026.org. The full agenda is available here.

In this episode Ian speaks with Dr. Pablo Cortés, who is a full professor with a chair in Civil Justice at Leicester Law School, in the UK, where he teaches and conducts research in the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), civil procedure and consumer law. He is also an online arbitrator-adjudicator for CEDR’s aviation, telecommunications and water disputes schemes. He has published widely in the field of technology and dispute resolution, including The Law of Consumer Redress (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and prior to that he edited The New Regulatory Framework for Consumer Dispute Resolution (Oxford University Press, 2016).

He has now written, for Cambridge University Press, Dispute Resolution Processes in England and Wales: Justice, Settlement and Technology; and has published a co-edited volume, Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence in Courts (OUP, 2025). Of interest to this conversation is his soon-to-be-published paper, “Lex Obscura: The Emergence of Civil Justice Beyond the State in Darknet Markets.”