Digital Environment: Immediation

Building digital infrastructure for dispute resolution

Most legal technology focuses on lawyers.

Immediation focused on something broader: the process through which disputes themselves are resolved.

Founded in Melbourne, Immediation developed a digital dispute-resolution platform designed for activities including mediations, arbitrations, hearings and other forms of dispute resolution.

The significance of that model goes beyond videoconferencing.

A conventional dispute process consists of many separate components: documents, communications, participants, evidence, hearings, scheduling and ultimately an outcome.

Once those components move into a purpose-built digital environment, the opportunity arises to redesign the process itself.

That can include structured case information, digital evidence management, online hearings and workflows specifically designed around dispute resolution rather than simply reproducing a physical hearing through generic technology.

This points towards one of the most important frontiers in legal technology.

AI can make lawyers dramatically more efficient while leaving the underlying justice system essentially unchanged.

Digital dispute resolution asks a more fundamental question:

if we were designing the process today, would we design it the same way?

That question has implications well beyond commercial arbitration. Courts, tribunals, ombuds schemes, regulators and community justice organisations all deal with processes that were largely designed for a paper-and-person world.

Immediation is an important Australian example of legal technology moving beyond tools for lawyers and towards technology as infrastructure for the justice process itself.