Immediation, which provides an online platform for legal dispute resolution, recently inked a licensing deal with The Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution, a British firm.
The agreement is the latest for Immediation — which was founded in Australia and headquartered in Woodland Hills — as it continues to expand its global marketplace. The company offers a modular platform that entities including mediators and courts can use in customized and integrated ways to handle legal disputes.
“This was not a technology that was retrofitted to legal application,” explained Immediation Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer Joseph Panetta. “This was a legal process that was digitized.”
Put another way, the company took a number of procedures involved with lawsuits — evidence submission, deposition recording, video conferencing — and put together a platform designed to handle it all efficiently and effectively, Panetta said.
The company was formed in 2016 after Laura Keily, an Australian attorney, handled a legal dispute over less than $300,000 that had incurred more than half a million dollars of expenses during the mediation process.
“She thought to herself that there has got to be a better way to solve legal disputes,” Panetta said. “It’s reflective of the process that the founder lived through. You should be able to upload evidence without other parties seeing it. You shouldn’t be able to accidentally place someone in the wrong (video conference) room. There were lots of things that went into the construction of the platform.”
The brand got its start in the Australian and New Zealand markets and began to enter the North American and European markets more recently. Its timing was solid — the Covid-19 pandemic meant that every courthouse in the United States went remote and virtual.
“Zoom is great for a conversation with, say, your grandma,” Panetta said, “but if you want to have a two-sided adversarial process that is any sort of dispute resolution that involves a neutral (party), you need something built for that kind of play.”
With around 45 different features in the platform, Immediation can connect to individual clients’ application programming interface, or API, to pull localized data and information.
“We were extremely impressed with Immediation’s solution, as it is fully customizable and provides a simple and intuitive experience for both our internal and external users,” Graham Massie, chief operating officer and director at the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution, said in a statement. “We have great expectations for our partnership with Immediation as we take this significant step forward to more effectively and efficiently manage our cases on a single, highly secure platform that is ready to use globally.”
Immediation expects to announce an additional series of partnerships this summer. It was developed with input from more than 100 professional mediators and has achieved ISO 27001 certification for data security.
“We’re just scratching the surface,” Panetta said. “One of the main selling points among mediation is that when we go out to different markets and talk about our service, we hear a lot about data. Courts and dispute resolution centers are sitting on huge amounts of data. The problem is, they don’t know how to access it or have it tell them something.”