Dispute resolution or dispute settlement is the process of resolving disputes between parties. The term dispute resolution is sometimes used interchangeably with conflict resolution.
Roger D. Fisher was Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Online dispute resolution (ODR) is a form of dispute resolution which uses technology to facilitate the resolution of disputes between parties. It primarily involves negotiation, mediation or arbitration, or a combination of all three. In this respect it is often seen as being the online equivalent of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). However, ODR can also augment these traditional means of resolving disputes by applying innovative techniques and online technologies to the process.
The Program on Negotiation (PON) is a university consortium dedicated to developing the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution. As a community of scholars and practitioners, PON serves a unique role in the world negotiation community. Founded in 1983 as a special research project at Harvard Law School, PON includes faculty, students, and staff from Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Brandeis University.
Tommy Koh Thong Bee is a Singaporean diplomat, lawyer, professor and author who served as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations between 1968 and 1971.
The Mutual Gains Approach (MGA) to negotiation is a process model, based on experimental findings and hundreds of real-world cases, that lays out four steps for negotiating better outcomes while protecting relationships and reputation. A central tenet of the model, and the robust theory that underlies it, is that a vast majority of negotiations in the real world involve parties who have more than one goal or concern in mind and more than one issue that can be addressed in the agreement they reach. The model allows parties to improve their chances of creating an agreement superior to existing alternatives.
Frank E. A. Sander was an American professor emeritus and associate dean of Harvard Law School. He pioneered the field of alternative dispute resolution and is widely credited with being a father of the field in the United States as a result of his paper, The Varieties of Dispute Processing, presented at the Pound Conference in 1976 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sander's book, Dispute Resolution: Negotiation, Mediation, and Other Processes, which he coauthored with Stephen B. Goldberg, Nancy H. Rogers, and Sarah Rudolph Cole, is used in law schools throughout the United States.
Alternative dispute resolution (ADR), or external dispute resolution (EDR), typically denotes a wide range of dispute resolution processes and techniques that parties can use to settle disputes with the help of a third party. They are used for disagreeing parties who cannot come to an agreement short of litigation. However, ADR is also increasingly being adopted as a tool to help settle disputes within the court system.
A complaint system is a set of procedures used in organizations to address complaints and resolve disputes. Complaint systems in the US have undergone significant innovation especially since about 1970 with the advent of extensive workplace regulation. Notably in many countries, conflict management channels and systems have evolved from a major focus on labor-management relations to a much wider purview that includes unionized workers and also managers, non-union employees, professional staff, students, trainees, vendors, donors, customers, etc.
Paul F. Levy is an American businessman, author, professor, and was elected on Nov 2, 2021 to a two-year term for the Ward 6 seat on the Newton (MA) School Committee. He is noted for his use of social media in health care leadership roles, and has been the subject of academic research and Harvard Business School case studies about the role of social media in important and complex negotiations.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In is a best-selling 1981 non-fiction book by Roger Fisher and William Ury. Subsequent editions in 1991 and 2011 added Bruce Patton as co-author. All of the authors were members of the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Lawrence E. Susskind is a teacher, trainer, mediator, and urban planner. He is one of the founders of the field of public dispute mediation and is a practicing international mediator through the Consensus Building institute. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1971.
Nancy Diane Erbe is an American negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). Over the course of her career, she has collaborated with a wide spectrum of individuals and groups representing more than 80 countries, from colleagues and associates to clients and students, on these issues. She is a Fulbright Scholar, Senior Specialist in Peace and Conflict Resolution, and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair. She has received four Fulbright Honors to date including two in the same year (2015) which is extremely rare. She is the recipient of the Presidential Outstanding Professor Award-2015. In 2015 she along with her husband facilitated the start of the Arab world's first Master's Program in Peace Studies in West Bank. She has been a reviewer for Fulbright Commission in Egypt since 2016.
The Harvard Negotiation Project is a project created at Harvard University which deals with issues of negotiations and conflict resolution.
Allan Jeffrey Stitt is a chartered Canadian arbitrator, mediator and film producer. He is the president and CEO of ADR Chambers, a Canadian arbitration and mediation organization. Stitt is the recipient of the 2006 Ontario Bar Association Award of Excellence in Alternative Dispute Resolution. In 2022, Stitt was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Windsor Faculty of Law. As a movie executive producer, Stitt has also contributed to films including The Layover, The Birth of a Nation, Into the Forest, I Saw the Light, and Ithaca.
James K. Sebenius is an American economist, currently the Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School as well as co-founder and partner of Lax Sebenius LLC, specializes in analyzing and advising corporations and governments worldwide on their most complex and challenging negotiations.
David Lax is an American negotiation expert, author, speaker, statistician and academic. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Managing Principal of Lax Sebenius LLC, a firm that advises companies and governments in challenging and complex negotiations, and a former professor at Harvard Business School.
Michael Tsur is an Israeli attorney, negotiator, mediator, and academic. He teaches mediation and negotiation in several institutions worldwide and was involved as a negotiator in a number of events, such as Kidnapping of Alan Johnston, Siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and Israeli disengagement from Gaza.
David Alan Hoffman is an American attorney, mediator, arbitrator, author, and academic. He is the John H. Watson, Jr. Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. He is also the founder of Boston Law Collaborative. His TEDx talk on Lawyers as Peacemakers describes his decision to discontinue courtroom advocacy and focus exclusively on mediation, arbitration, and Collaborative law.
