Originally from The College of Commercial Arbitrators Guide to Best Practices in Commercial Arbitration, Fifth Edition

PREVIEW PAGE

Many in the ADR community have noted that it is behind other professions in the diversity of its practitioners.  This resources note provides information that will be useful for those who want to build a career in arbitration, and users, arbitrators, and arbitral institutions who want to appoint or build panels representing all available talent. 

In 1993, a AAA Dispute Resolution Journal article noted that “a huge disparity exists within the ADR profession between the number of male and female practitioners.”  See Dorissa Balinski and David Singer, “Why Are So Few Women in the ADR Field?,” 48 Dispute Resolution J. No. 3 (1993).  Twenty-five years later, the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession Perspectives newsletter featured an article whose title asked essentially the same question in Helen Hayes, “Where Are the Women Arbitrators? The Battle to Diversity ADR,” Perspectives (winter 2018). Hayes recognized that not much progress had been made in the battle to diversify ADR. She commented that “women in ADR say that issues other areas of law confronted long ago—such as limited opportunities, “old boy” networks, and the failure to track diversity numbers—continue to impact women and people of color.”

In spite of slow progress, the ADR community has embraced the need to diversify its practitioners. ADR administering institutions have long recognized the benefits of recruiting and retaining qualified professionals with a wide range of ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. They stress that many parties want to consider women and ethnically diverse mediators and arbitrators when they select ADR professionals. JAMS, for instance, has developed a way for law firms and companies to monitor their DEI progress by tracking their neutral selection data using JAMS’ Panelist Utilization Report. The report includes a list of the user’s previous JAMS cases and the neutrals who handled them, with data highlighting the use of JAMS panelists who have self-identified as diverse. Results can be customized by date range, case type, and practice area.