I may have misunderstood the fundamental concept of my project in my first Dissertation Diary entry: easily done when I’ve been unable to meet with my supervisor and when the assigned project was not on the official list, giving me little more than the title to go on. As a reminder, the title of my project is “Online Dispute Resolution for Maritime Collisions”.
Today I started looking for any services that already do what my project intends to do. Given that 50% of the title is “Online Dispute Resolution”, I tried Googling the phrase to see if my project will be a specialised branch of an existing industry. It looks, perhaps, like this may be the case.
Modria claim to be “The World’s Leading Online Dispute Resolution Experts”, with over 400 million dispute resolutions to their name. They have an “intelligent resolutions platform” divided into four modules: diagnosis, negotiation, mediation and arbitration. It is a business-to-business product: you can buy a Modria Resolution Center and be “up and running in as few as 30 days”.
The advantages of the Modria Resolution Center are:
- Reduced legal risk – resolving disputes quickly decreases the chance of lawsuits because your customers feel like they’re being heard.
- Lower operating costs – managing disputes online lowers travel expenses.
- Increase customer loyalty – fast, fair resolutions = happier customers.
- Fast deployment – allegedly, Modria’s modular approach “takes costly customization out of the equation”.
To me, this looks like a specialised version of JIRA: people create ‘dispute tickets’ to help resolve arguments and ambiguities in a structured, documented way. It doesn’t appear to be the ‘judge and jury’ product I was envisaging when I first heard about this project.
What Modria have done is created a framework allowing businesses to resolve disputes with their customers (and with other businesses)… whatever the dispute may be. So what is the value in me creating an online dispute resolution system specifically for maritime collisions? What can be achieved with a more specialised system?
Hopefully my thoughts to date have not been completely fruitless. My dispute resolution system specifically for maritime law could mimic Modria, but with specialised functions such as:
- The abilty to feed in details of your case in a structured way, so that:
- The most similar, resolved disputes are automatically displayed for comparison, along with…
- …an approximate percentage of certainty in the likelihood of success or failure of the client’s case in court. This might help to influence the advice the lawyer gives to their client.
- The ability to search for historical cases (irrespective of one’s own case) and bring up the details.
I hope to clarify the nature of my project with my supervisor later this week.
Maritime law
Before I started this project, I was informed that maritime law with respect to vessel collisions is relatively short, simple, and thus translatable to code. The Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute (PACLII) link to a number of documents which define conventions, legislations and laws regarding maritime collisions.
A promising document linked to from the page is the Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules of Law with respect to Collisions between Vessels, drafted in Brussels in 1910 and enforced from March 1st, 1913. This convention lists 17 articles, each of which is only a sentence or two in length and describes rules that come into effect should vessels collide. I can already see how some of these articles might be translated into business logic in code.
Regardless of the nature of my project, I’ll need to know maritime law in detail so that I can validate the behaviour of my application. These documents will be a good place to start.
