A Summary of the Court-annexed Arbitration Evaluation Project
| Publication year | 1991 |
| Pages | 1595 |
| Citation | Vol. 20 No. 8 Pg. 1595 |
1991, August, Pg. 1595. A Summary of the Court-Annexed Arbitration Evaluation Project
From January 1988 until mid-1991, Colorado was among that half of the states in the nation which, under certain circumstances, compel the non-binding private arbitration of civil disputes that would otherwise have been subject to trial in a court of general jurisdiction. As formulated by the legislature,(fn1) implemented by the courts(fn2) and subsequently amended,(fn3) this experimental program mandated the private, non-binding arbitration of civil disputes in eight of the state's twenty-two trial court districts in cases where no equitable remedy was sought and the plaintiff's prayer amount did not exceed $50,000.
To assess its effectiveness, in 1988 the University of Colorado Conflict Resolution Consortium obtained a grant from the State Justice Institute(fn4) to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of the arbitration program on the administration of civil justice in Colorado. The study sought to determine if and how well the program achieved the following related policy objectives: to reduce court congestion, individual case processing time, dispute resolution costs for litigants and dispute resolution costs for the state, as well as to enhance or at least maintain current levels of user satisfaction with the civil justice system.
To determine whether and how well the program fulfilled the objectives listed above, the authors devised several methods for evaluating, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the impact mandatory arbitration was having on the administration of civil justice in the state. Moreover, to help facilitate comparison of the Colorado program's performance with similar arbitration systems in other states, the authors designed data-gathering instruments comparable to those used to evaluate some of these other programs. Four measurement methods were used:
1. Questionnaires were sent to all attorneys, litigants and arbitrators who participated in an arbitration hearing between January 1988 and June 1989 (the first eighteen months of the arbitration program). Other questionnaires were sent to attorneys and litigants who tried similar cases in the same court districts between June 1986 and December 1987 (the eighteen-month period immediately prior to arbitration program implementation). The questionnaires were either mailed or a telephone survey was performed. The response rate to the mailed survey was from 30 to 40 percent, depending on respondent group (nearly 40 percent of attorneys responded).
2. Case history data were gathered from trial court records on a sample of 800 cases that entered the arbitration program in 1988 and 800 similar cases that entered the civil litigation process in the same courts in 1987 (the year before the arbitration program was implemented). In choosing non-arbitration cases both for interviewing and case history purposes, only those cases were selected that would have been subject to arbitration had the program existed in 1987.
3. In-depth personal interviews were conducted with the chief judges (or their designees), court administrators and chief clerks in the pilot project districts to learn of their personal experiences in program implementation.
4. Court caseload backlogs of judges were analyzed in districts which were and were not...
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