Roger Smith reports on haste, waste & the Rechtwijzer
Sir Terence Etherton is having none of it. For him, the failure of the much publicised Rechtwijzer, developed by the Dutch Legal Aid Board, is without relevance to plans for an Online Solutions Court: ‘There is a fundamental difference between the Online Solutions Court and the Rechtwijzer. Our approach is to develop a court, which incorporates [online dispute resolution] ODR into its processes, rather than to develop an ODR platform which sits outside of the court system. The Rechtwijzer’s failure should properly be seen as more a consequence of individuals preferring the courts to resolve their disputes than their rejection of online processes,’ (the Lord Slynn Memorial lecture, 14 June 2017).
You would have found it difficult to escape coverage of the Rechtwijzer in its heyday. Missionaries were sent out from one of the three organisations behind it, the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL) around the world. It went through two iterations—version 1.0 and 2.0. There is rather more to be said about its decline than Sir Terene makes out.
If somehow the
