Providing Mediation, arbitration, and special master services for complex commercial litigation
in southern colorado and throughout the front range

What is ADR?

ADR stands for alternative dispute resolution. It includes things like mediation, where a neutral person helps both sides talk and try to agree on how a dispute can be resolved, or arbitration, where someone makes a decision for them (rather than using a judge or jury). ADR is different from the usual court process because it’s less formal, quicker, and usually cheaper. In court, a judge follows strict rules and makes a decision that might not make everyone happy. Trying to resolve a case in court can take many months, or sometimes years. ADR lets people work together, keep things private, and find solutions that work for both sides, often much more quickly than a court process. 

What is a Special Master?

Sometimes lawsuits filed in court have extremely complicated or time-consuming aspects that a judge may have difficulty handling on a timely basis. Perhaps the parties have a lot of complicated disputes over things like discovery in a case (the process by which parties obtain information from one another that they may need to prove their case) or there are a lot of documents that a judge cannot easily review and make informed decisions about. This is because judges are often extremely busy, with dozens or hundreds of cases for which they are responsible. In more complicated cases, judges will sometimes appoint a special master (often an experienced attorney) to review and make recommendations to the court regarding how the matter should be resolved. The parties may object to the special master’s recommendations, and the judge may accept or reject these recommendations, and only a judge’s order has the force of law. But basically a special master acts as an assistant to the judge when cases are unusually complicated, difficult, or contentious. This allows the judge to better manage the other cases on his or her docket rather than being bogged down in a single, unusually time-consuming lawsuit.