The Court ODR Podcast

In this episode, Colin interviews Vickie Wood, Founder and CEO of Judicaid.com, an AI mediation platform already live on the court website in Napa, California.
Many people know Vickie as Judge Wood, because she spent decades working in the courts, watching people fighting all the way through trial, exhausted from the conflict. After retiring from the Superior Court bench in 2024, she became a professional mediator. She concluded that courtrooms are an essential part of our justice system, but are often best reserved for when other resolution paths have been fully explored. At the same time, traditional mediation can often be too costly for less complex cases. That was why she created Judicaid, an AI mediation platform built to empower people to resolve disputes simply and fairly, on their own time, and in their own language.
Colin and Vickie discuss her path through court administration to the judiciary, and then private dispute resolution practice, and then to Judicaid. Vickie describes the platform in detail before Colin and Vickie look a little into the future to predict the future of AI mediation in the courts.

In this episode, Colin interviews Judge Stacy Guillon, who serves in the 23rd District of Colorado. Before joining the bench, Judge Guillon spent years as a litigator at Lewis Roca (now Womble Bond Dickinson) in Denver, and as an Arbitrator and Mediator with Decisioncraft across Colorado and around the United States. This wide-ranging conversation focuses on differences between the role of an arbitrator and a judge, and how those differences will affect how AI is deployed across the private sector and the courts over the coming years.

In this episode, Colin interviews Anthony Bayne, a 25+ year deputy public defender currently running for judge in Los Angeles. Anthony is also a technology innovator, having applied for two patents around integrating AI into the work of lawyers. This conversation talks about openness in the judiciary to using technology, and how technology can help public defenders more effectively represent their clients.
Information about Anthony: https://electbayneforjudge.com/aj-bayne

In this episode, Colin interviews Professor Paul Welter of Florida State University, Co-Founder of http://bayshore.ai about his amazing new controllable AI for legal and compliance work, which is fully audit ready. One of the big challenges of bringing AI into the judicial process is that LLMs generate a new response to each query, and the same prompt can generate different outcomes. This makes relying on platforms like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT a little bit like rolling the dice. Paul has devised a way to leverage the power of AI while also delivering consistent outcomes, and in this episode he discusses his approach, and why it's important.
More about Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-f-welter/?locale=en
More about his company and platform, bayshore.ai: http://bayshore.ai/

In this episode Colin chats with Geoff Drucker, Senior Director of the American Health Law Association’s (AHLA) Dispute Resolution Service, about the online arbitration system that he built over the last decade to handle complex health care disputes. He has taught negotiation, mediation and alternative dispute resolution an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School since 2003. Geoff’s publications include Resolving 21st Century Disputes: Best Practices for a Fast-Paced World (Prospecta Press 2012), and chapters on Dispute Resolution in Fundamentals of Health Law (7th Ed.) (AHLA 2018) and Health Care Contracts (1st Ed.) (AHLA 2021). Prior to joining AHLA, Geoff was the Director of Federal Programs for The McCammon Group and Chief Counsel for Dispute Resolution and Prevention for the U.S. Postal Service. Geoff received a BA with distinction from Stanford University in 1982, a JD from the UCLA School of Law in 1985, and an MS in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University in 1997. Geoff served two terms as President of the Board of Directors of NVMS Conflict Resolution Center in Fairfax, Virginia, and now serves on the Advisory Committee.
Learn more about Geoff: linkedin.com/in/geoffdrucker

In this episode Colin chats with Sateesh Nori, a lawyer, law professor, and author on the leading edge of AI and A2J.  Sateesh is a Senior Legal Innovation Strategist at Just-Tech and the visionary behind Claimsy, a new AI-powered resolution platform. For twenty years, he represented tenants across New York City at various legal services organizations.  He was a commissioner of the 2019 Charter Revision Commission. He is currently a member of the ABA Commission on Homelessness and Poverty. He  co-created and co-teaches the Housing Rights Clinic at NYU Law. Sateesh is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and NYU Law.  Sateesh was named a “Rising Star” by the New York Law Journal, one of “Queens’ Power 50,” and was featured as a “Legal Rebel” in the Spring  2021 ABA Journal. In 2023, he was a recipient of  the New York City Bar Association’s “Legal Services Award.” He is also the author of “Sheltered: Twenty Years in Housing Court.” In 2024, he gave a TedX Talk called “How a chatbot can stop homelessness.”
Learn more about Sateesh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sateesh-nori-9a80aa102/
 

In this episode Colin chats with David Pisarra, founder of Men's Family Law in Santa Monica, California. He is an expert in family law, including divorce, alimony, child custody and support. David practices in the courts of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and Ventura counties regularly. He has authored three books for men; A Man's Guide to Child Custody, A Man's Guide to Divorce Strategy and A Man's Guide to Domestic Violence. David earned his B.A. degree from St. John's College and his J.D. degree from the University of West Los Angeles.
David is the host of The Union of Dads podcast, which features interviews and insights from experts, advocates, and dads who share their stories and advice on how to navigate the legal system and the emotional journey of fatherhood. His program Dad's Law School is designed to help fathers who are representing themselves in Family Court. The program is designed to teach fathers how to present their case to the judge, how to overcome the challenges and biases they face, and how to create a parenting plan that works for them and their kids. He also does live, in person trainings that cover Evidence, Discovery and Courtroom skills.
More about David: https://mensfamilylaw.com/ 
More about Union of Dads: https://www.unionofdads.com/ 
Info on his book Dad's Child Custody Action Plan: https://www.unionofdads.com/offers/pzLYitMZ/checkout 

In this episode Colin chats with Professor Henry Zhuhao Wang from the College of law at Florida State University about asynchronous trials, or trials that take places online without real-time interaction between the litigants and judge. Almost all US court procedures currently involve live, real-time interaction between the participants (e.g. in person or video hearings, referred to as synchronous interactions) -- in contrast, asynchronous trials enable participants to log in, respond to information, and then log out (think email based interaction, or an online discussion forum, or even a documents-based arbitration). As more of the internet moves from synchronous to asynchronous interaction, Henry and Colin explore the challenges and opportunities that could arise from the application of this new model to trials.
Henry Zhuhao Wang is the Tallahassee alumni professor at Florida State University College of Law. His research focuses on evidence and juridical proof, exploring evidence law outside the jury context, primarily in bench trials, arbitration, and administrative proceedings. He served as a visiting professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law during the 2022-2023 academic year and was a professor at China University of Political Science and Law from 2012 to 2022. Wang co-authored the book “Proof in Modern Litigation: Evidence Law & Forensic Science Perspectives” (Barr Smith Press 2017), and published extensively in U.S., Chinese, and international legal journals. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Texas Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Utah Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, Denver Law Review, Nevada Law Journal, and the peer-reviewed International Journal of Evidence & Proof. He previously worked as an international associate at Locke Lord LLP in Dallas, Texas, and as a visiting researcher at the University of Adelaide Law School in Adelaide, Australia. He teaches Civil Procedure, Evidence, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.
More about Henry: http://law.fsu.edu/faculty-staff/henry-zhuhao-wang
Henry's article "Asynchronous Trials: A New Approach To High-Volume Civil Adjudication" in the Denver law Review (discussed extensively in the podcast) can be accessed here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4946817
 

In this episode, Colin interviews AI and justice expert Richard Susskind about his new book, How to Think about AI: A Guide for the Perplexed, the latest developments in AI and the justice system, and how artificial intelligence will transform court ODR (as well as our very notions of the role of humans in justice) over the coming years and decades.
Professor Richard Susskind CBE KC (Hon) is the world’s most cited author on the future of legal services and a leading expert on the impact of AI on society. He is President of the Society for Computers and Law and, from 1998 to 2023, he served as Technology Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. In 2024, Richard was appointed Special Envoy for Justice and AI to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. He advises leading professional firms, in-house legal departments, and governments and judiciaries around the world. In the 1980s, he wrote his doctorate on AI and the law at Balliol College, Oxford. His work has been translated into 18 languages and he has been invited to speak in over 60 countries. He has written eleven books, including Online Courts and the Future of Justice (2019, 2021) and How to Think About AI (2025).
More about Richard: https://www.susskind.com/
Information about his new book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Think-About-AI-Perplexed/dp/0198941927
Online Courts and the Future of Justice: https://www.amazon.com/Online-Courts-Justice-Richard-Susskind/dp/0192849301

In this episode Colin chats with former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Rebecca (Becky) Kourlis.  After her service on the bench, Becky founded and lead the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver, which continues to tackle some of the legal system’s most entrenched problems. Becky's public policy work over the years has focused on court procedures, legal ethics, regulation of the legal profession, water, oil and gas, jury trial reforms, and education issues. Becky now serves as a full-time neutral at her ADR firm Decisioncraft, where she is available for arbitrations, mediations, public policy facilitations, and court and moot court services.
More about Becky: https://decisioncraftadr.com/becky-kourlis