Pushing the Limits on Court-Annexed Arbitration: The Hawaii Experience
Justice System Journal, Vol. 14, p. 131, 1991
21 Pages Posted: 26 Jul 2009
Date Written: 1991
Abstract
This is the third of a series of four articles describing the evaluation results for Hawaii’s mandatory Court-Annexed Arbitration Program (CAAP), a program with a $150,000 jurisdictional limit. The article reports on survey data from over 600 returned surveys from lawyers in CAAP cases. The evaluation was focused on the litigation costs, pace of litigation and satisfaction of the participants because these factors reflect the goals of CAAP. The survey results might be very useful for other states considering using an arbitration program with a high jurisdictional limit. The article reports on lawyers’ opinions about pretrial discovery reduction, discovery costs, the pace of litigation, satisfaction with the program, arbitrator workload, arbitrator fairness, case value and complexity, and looks at differences in lawyers’ opinions depending upon whether the lawyers used contingency or hourly fees. Because most court-annexed arbitration program have much lower jurisdictional limits, the article also examines the survey results by case value – looking responses for cases valued up to $15,000, from $15,001 to $50,000, and at $50,001 and above.
Keywords: arbitration, court-annexed arbitration, litigation, law, justice system, civil justice, program evaluation, alternative dispute resolution, ADR, program description, litigation, empirical study, research, pretrial discovery, discovery reduction, costs of litigation, pace of litigation, satisfaction
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