How ADR Notable Helps Mediators And Arbitrators Run Secure, Efficient Cases

Before I push the play button for this legal tech start-up focus podcast episode, I want to give Stephanie Wilkins of Legal Tech Hub the microphone. Stephanie is going to talk about how the conversation about AI and legal has changed from the way it sounded even just a few months ago. As Stephanie explains in more detail, the conversation around this topic has grown much more nuanced. Here's Stephanie. Hi, Legal Tech Start-up focus listeners. I'm Stephanie Wilkins, Director of Content at Legal Tech Hub. Much like many of you, our team is freshly back from what's been a busy start to the 2026 conference season. Both Legal Week and ABA Tech Show have come and gone and there's a lot to unpack. The main headline is that AI has dominated conversations once again, but the nature of those conversations is genuinely changing. Most people are past the hype and into the harder questions. Like ROI, governance, shadow AI and what anthropics moves into legal actually mean for the market. Consolidation was also on everyone's mind, between a new trend of joint vendor offerings and an increased focus on integrations that are continuing to blur traditional product category lines. On the buy side, the cohort of people still asking whether to use Gen AI is shrinking fast. It's no longer about if but how and how to get actual value from it. There's a lot more detail in our conference write-ups on LegalTechnologyHub.com and we'll continue to report on industry trends as the conference calendar stretches through the year. Hello everyone, this is your podcast host at the Legal Tech Start-up Focus Podcast. I am very pleased honored to have as a guest on the podcast today, Gary Dornheifer, a founder, the founder and CEO of ADR Notable. ADR Notable might give away the space in which ADR Notable works alternative dispute resolution. So I was a corporate lawyer. And yet I am aware of mediation and arbitration if only when it came to drafting mediation and arbitration clauses in corporate agreements. And up from me, let me welcome Gary. Welcome. Thank you, Charlie. It's great to be here. I had the pleasure, the great pleasure of meeting Gary at the latest TLTF summit in Austin, Texas this past fall. Great to see you virtually again. Yeah, it's good to see you too. It was great meeting you there. I was an amazing event too. Yeah, it's a wonderful event, but forward to next year, I think it's Scottsdale. So that'll be coming before you know it. So Gary, tell us a little bit about your journey into Legal Tech. I know you're a lawyer. In fact, you went to my Law School University of Chicago. So we have that in common. We could reminisce about that. But we're going to focus instead on what you do, what ADR Notable does and then get into some related topics. So tell us about you and ADR Notable. Well, the journey for me, Charlie, was because most of my career was spent as an in-house lawyer. So, you know, I graduated from University of Chicago Law School and started with Mayor Brown, used to be Mayor Brown in Playa, and in litigation, actually in their Denver office, which they only had it at briefly. And shortly after that, I went in-house. I started with American Airlines and then with orbits. Now, tech startup outside of the aviation space and then back with the aviation industry as the General Counsel for the Global Trade Association for the Airlines called the International Air Transport Association. But it's the in-house perspective that got me excited about ADR because when you're responsible for the budget and for outcomes, litigation is not a very attractive picture. You know, my I always tell the story about a CEO, you name it, whether it's at the orbits or at Ayada coming to me and saying, okay, Gary, we've been sued. How much is it going to cost? How long is it going to take and what's the likelihood of our winning? And you can't seriously answer any of those questions. You start to look for alternatives to litigation that, you know, can control the outcome. In some cases, in some of my situations, I found my company in, my client in, preserving relationships because you resolved it in a more collegial way through mediation. So it was just an interesting area for me because of my legal experience. And then I sort of completed one of the job in Ayada, which had me living abroad and returned to the home state where my spouse was a college professor in Ohio. And I started working with the faculty at the Ohio State University School of Law. And in, which by the way, to my surprise, frankly, at the time was, I learned as ranked always in the top three faculties in the field of ADR in the state. Trading places with Pepperdine and Harvard, the three of them are constantly in the hunt for spot number one. And that's where I just realized that it was that one, the business process flow of being immediate or being an arbitrator, the perspective on the dispute is very different than being an advocate on behalf of a party to the dispute. You know, take the most obvious example of you're an advocate, you're in, in litigation, you're worried about doing legal research, writing briefs, pretrial motions, you're managing discovery, you know, potentially reviewing tens of thousands of not hundreds of thousands of documents, calling them down into exhibits, taking depositions and so forth. You know, none of that really has, is the same in perspective, even as an arbitrator, which is the closest analogy to a political moment of litigation. So it just became obvious that the case management requirements for the ADR practitioner were different than the case management requirements of an advocate or a lawyer in a case and that nobody had really addressed a product targeting the practitioner, the ADR practitioner. And that's how the concept of building ADR came into being. And what is it about principally, about that different perspective that has to be taken when you're talking about, on the one hand, a lawyer acting as an advocate before a judge and a lawyer who's advocating a client's case to a mediator or arbitrator? So in terms of the feature set that you designed for an ADR practitioner, some of it overlaps, who are the parties, who are the council, how do I contact them? You know, communications is a little different because as a mediator, for instance, you can do private communications with an individual party as an arbitrator, pretty much all communications are opened to all parties. So you have to ensure that your internal communications portal can operate in either mode, right, private, X part day, in the case of a mediator and public in the case of the arbitrator. I mean, we can manage documents, but we don't manage the kind of volume that a lawyer preparing the case has to worry about because by the time it gets to the ADR practitioner, a set of relevant documents has been called, right, and as much smaller. So we can certainly upload documents confidentially and securely and then then organize them in case files. And then scheduling, I mean, scheduling is a nightmare for anybody who's trying to, who's in control of the process of dispute resolution. So, you know, that's the role of the mediator and that's the role of the arbitrator. So we have technology that helps you find that half a day or full day. It's open on everybody's calendar and automatically book it, whether it's in person or via the Zoom or, you know, so forth. So scheduling is different, building is different, private practitioners, lawyers almost never have the need to split the bill, their bill between parties, usually you can only reference that as single party without a conflict of interest in a case, but in mediation and arbitration, you always have more than one party. So we designed our own billing module, which manages that process. And sometimes I had one of our clients call me once laughing that he was just taken on a divorce mediation that he was now anticipating was going to be unbelievably painful because the first thing they did was to negotiate the split of his invoice 28, 7, 28, 72 percent between the parties and it took him a week to do that. But in our staff, you could just set that one time in the case and all the rest of your buildings now gets split accordingly. So there's just, you know, as you move through it and then of course your goal, your job as the dispute resolution practitioner is to, if you're a mediator, is to facilitate discussion between the parties. You're not, you're not trying to organize facts and so forth in a way to, to present one side in its best life. you're there to manage the process, understand where the parties are, help them find common ground. And if you're an arbitrator, again, you're just the recipient of briefs or argument, and you need to be able to track, you know, what is the point of me by law? What is the requirements the plaintiff must prove in their case? And, you know, what evidence do they put on to do that? And then what is the defendant's response to that evidence and so forth. So even in the section of our product that helps you take notes, you can organize that in a way where you kind of put in a column down the middle. What are the elements of proof the plaintiff's case? Take notes during the plaintiff's case on the left and notes during the defendant's case on the right. And you can see the linkages between the evidence and the proof and the required proof. So it's, and then last, I mean, one of the most important features, you know, the process of dispute resolution is practitioners are very intense about confidentiality. I mean, the whole premise for instance of arbitration fails if the process is not kept confidential. People will not be open forthcoming. They won't make offers or proffers, you know, to the other party. If they think that can all come out later and be used against them. And as a result, particularly mediators, but arbitrators as well, when the matter is completed, there is a desire to delete the content that might be confidential. So all of your notes that a mediator or an arbitrator may take during the matter, confidential documents that were uploaded during the proceeding, all of that for mediators goes away because they live in fear of somebody testing the confidentiality, which is generally protected by law, with a subpoena, you know, at the back. And the best defense, of course, in any concern about protecting confidentiality or privacy is don't keep it. That's right. Yeah, you're probably getting rid of it. Yeah. Right. And you know, of course, the law firm products are designed the other way around to maintain your case files for a long periods of time. And so ours actually facilitates the elimination of confidential information. Yeah. So they're during the course of the case. Now, in designing the product, were you and let me make sure for our listeners say, I get it right. Is it pitched? And maybe this goes to the question of who your customer is, is it pitched to the decider, the arbitrator, the mediator? And when I say it, I mean, ADR, do it a little bit. The product, is it pitched to the decider or is it pitched to the contesting party's council or is it all of them? So initially, really frankly, until just recently, it was pitched entirely to the practitioner, the idea, you know, the mediator or arbitrator, was a tool for their use facing them only. But one of the ingredients in that we, our clients told us they wanted was the ability to communicate outside of email, which of course, not confidential. And there is an ABA ethics opinion that says, it's not confidential. So we have recently released a little user portal for the parties where they can log in, they can text message securely with the with the practitioner. And they can actually see a few things that are going on in the case. So they can, in particular, anything they owe, if there is a document, so that the, the, the arbitrator mediator is asked for certain kinds of materials. There's a little panel that says you have an outstanding document request. And that's into the system that facilitates document transfer in a secure way. Or if you're, there's a digital signature document awaiting your signature that you're portal. And so there's a little mini, mini dashboard for the, for the participant or their counsel to see what's kind of going on in the case. If it's an arbitration, they have access to the open filing section, you know, where documents are filed, openly for all parties to see right from that portal. But primarily, you know, it's from its origin, it's the tool for the practitioner who's running the process to use to get everything kind of under one in one application on, you know, with our security wrapped around everything they do. And the, I guess, a question that I may have pointed this out to you, Gary, when we were going back and forth a little bit on how to design the discussion today. Is there the fact that it was originally designed, ADR notable to be pitched to the practitioner, as you call what I had called the decider? Does that distinguish it from some of the other esteemed competitors of yours in the market? Or what is the, how do you see ADR's special solid secret sauce when comparing yourselves to what else is out there? Yeah, there's, I mean, what else is it that's out there? I mean, we really sell against just a handful of things, right? There are fewer, few fingers on one hand of things. The most common thing we find in the smaller practitioner is they are cobbling together the tools that are otherwise all brought together in ours. So they're doing using some sort of software to build different kind of software to do this scheduling. My father, you know, so they've got the, you know, we called it the messy sock door approach where you've got a bunch of applications and they don't actually talk to one another without human intervention to move data from one to the other or whatever. That's, that was very common that people were just cobbling together, Excel spreadsheets and outlook, email, you know, folders and some sort of billing tool and so forth. So we've, that we've eliminated that inefficiency, security risk, the reason they have multiple software products. On the bigger, more sophisticated, you know, where we go in and start to sell to firms of arbitrators and mediators, we're almost always selling against whatever they built internally to sell. And no, that makes sense. We didn't exist just a few years ago. As those organizations got bigger, they needed to do something and there weren't alternatives like ours off the shelf in the marketplace. So they all built, you know, to build their own. So a lot of times I find myself having that, you know, the Congress, the first of all, the kind of Harvard Business School, by build decision. Right. With them, right? Is this core to your business and, you know, and all that sort of thing? And then secondly, I can't tell you how many times I hear the textbook definition of sunk cost fallacy. So our God, spirit, your system's great, but I can't change now because I've invested too much in my own system. And you just, you know, so you sort of shaped your head, say, listen, you're paying, I mean, I've talked to firms that are paying $40,000 a month to maintain their systems. That's right. In my sentence, yes. And I have one conversation with a leader of a public significant firm who, you know, proudly said, I've had two on full time software developers on, on staff for a couple of years and I just added a third. So he said, and, you know, repeated to some cost fallacy. And I just, and he was apologetic that he wasn't going to, you know, convert over to ADR notable. And I wrote him back and said, you don't have to apologize to me. I'm going to be selling to your competitors for the price of one of your software developers. Indeed. And is this tool available, well, available is really not the right word. Is it suitable for that? And I'll make the distinction between the commercial side of practice with institutions and enterprises and the like, whether the lawyers are small to medium size or large law firms, big law law firms or not. As opposed to the retail side, the mom and pop arbitrations and, and I don't say that disparagingly at all, mom and pop arbitrations and mediations, is it usable? And do you find it used in both spheres? Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, I mean, as I got into this, I hadn't really thought about how the whole market played out. Certainly I now know. And we designed it with a set of tools that were intended for the individual mediator or arbitrator. You know, at the delivery point of, of the services. So there are things even like I mentioned, structured ways to take your notes in real time, very efficient, very convenient. And it gives you a nice case map, whether you're a mediator or an arbitrator or an ambudsman, you know, anybody resolving conflict. Then as we grew, we started at layering in the more firm management type product or features. So data reporting is an obvious example. You could extract the data out at the end of the year. You can see what kinds of cases came in, how many hours on average you spend on them, and how much you earned on various kinds of cases. We have just, we're about to release a very sophisticated panel management. So if you're an organization that's got 500 new tools in your panel, and you get a call from a client and they need a three arbitration panel, they want expertise. They want at least one lawyer arbitrator, one professional from the industry, maybe a former contract construction contractor. But I have third, you need to be able to very quickly go into your roster, sort and find those people. Maybe there's a regional requirement. You want to follow it a particular part of the country, or you're going to do it online and you want somebody who's sophisticated and handling it online. So you keep all those characteristics about your panel members on file. And then you create a system where you can sort and identify those. You can do a rapid conflicts check with the known parties in the case. And you can maybe even check against their schedule so you don't offer the party who needs these people, somebody who just is too booked up to be to serve the need. And then you know, with the process for arbitration and mediation, you just to prefer a short list and let the parties resolve that off the short list. So panel management, and then on the back end of that, of course, you may have some agreed compensation split with that panel member where they keep, you know, 75% of their billing out of it or whatever. So you want to be able to generate, and we could do this already. We could generate a commission and compensation reports while off your panel. And so yeah, we started with the tools for the individual. And then we grew it into a product that is now managing firms and court processes, right? So a lot of courts manage a mediation program to try and take pressure off the dockets, which are always way behind these days. And the mediation programs work very well. And the one we work with, I know they resolve more than 75% of the cases that are sent to them. And you know, that's great stuff for a local courthouse that takes around 1000 cases off their docket, you know, and I love that, of course. Yeah, I even as a corporate lawyer appreciated the fact that litigation is someone one described it to me as it's Russian with a fully loaded revolver. No matter what happens, somebody's brains got blown out. And it perhaps everybody's brains in one form or another gets blown out as a result of a litigation. Just as an anecdote, when I was in House Council of American Airlines on major cases, we actually did almost like the TV show Bull. We did jury studies where we would recruit people in the same way the courthouse recruited jurors whether they're boating roles or whatever. We would bring them into a facility on a weekend. We would have concocted the best possible opening statements for both sides and recorded them so they would deliver the same way every time. And we showed them the same person, say to both persons, so there was no bias by who was delivering the message. And then we would watch them deliver it through a two-way mirror, the old fashion, old school stuff. And it was funny. They would come up with things that were not in the record at all and be convinced that somebody had said that or whatever. I knew it was like, yeah, no senior executive could have ever watched that process and then said, yeah, let's roll the dice and go to the let's spin that barrel. You obviously having gone to law school and there's a part of your background that we haven't talked about. You never became a software developer, I take it. So how did you and this may sort of segue into one part of the discussion that I alerted Gary to some of the business advice you might give to other founders of startups in the legal tech vertical? How did you manage that as a person well-versed in the legal and practical side of legal side of things? How did it just get fortunate with a co-founder who? Yeah, so what happened to me was, so I was the founding general counsel for Orbit. So I came in to Orbitz, the travel website, while they were building it. Wow. And it was, you know, my primary job was defending the company against the before I even got there before the product, why before the product was even on the market. The competitors had ginned up a lot of noise about Orbitz. It was owned by five airlines. So we were under investigation by the Justice Department and throwing a transportation and all that and that was my primary job. But at the same time, I was often being drawn into, you know, questions about data privacy and so forth. So you can't be a general counsel in a company that's primarily a technology company without becoming at least somewhat familiar with the technology. Sure. So that's how that bug bit is that it was, you know, Orbitz was primarily a technology company and there I was as initially as the only lawyer in the shop until I built out a legal department. So I do, I'm not, you know, I couldn't write a line of code. Well, maybe I couldn't have a AI. But before now, oh, you'd be surprised. I could probably have quite a bit. Yeah, I could not have written a line of code if I needed to, but I, so, but I could, I could talk the talk, right? I understood what was happening in the development, at least at the level that I needed to as a lawyer. And I was fascinated by it. It's, you know, the ability to use technology tools to accomplish various tasks was great. And then that got deep and the next step I mentioned the technology startup company. So that was when Orbitz was first built, we had a credit card fraud problem. People use unauthorized use of somebody else's card, me using your card to buy my card, right? And we had a software development firm in Chamburg, Illinois, build a, basically then it was not AI driven, it was rules engine. And you had to create your own rules and create your own weightings, depending on the outcome of the rule query. But they built it for us. And it looked at every transaction in real time and weighed the likelihood of it being fraud, queued them up with the most, most egregious likely fraud at the top. And then we had human intervention to resolve the kind, you know, resolve the problem. More great for Orbits. When Orbits was sold a year later, the controller of Orbits, my name is Jeff Liesendall, called me up and said, "You know, Gary, we had to build that because there wasn't such a thing in the market when we needed it." And there still isn't. So we got the principles of the firm that built at the first time in the fraud department manager of the controller of the general council of Orbits. And we put together another company. So there, I mean, again, I'll write up against the technology. And this time I'm a big major investor, you know, no salary and write in a big check and, you know, well, that's sort of thing. So, you know, I've always been technology adjacent for the back half of my career. Well, that's a good thing in your back pocket to have. Not all even in house level on private practice lawyers can say that. Any other thoughts that you might want to impart words of wisdom about? Let me interrupt myself and ask, how long has ADR notable been in the market? Yeah. So our first commercial sale was in 2021. Long growth for the first years because we were coming out of COVID, all the practitioners that we were trying to sell to you. First of all, I mean, as you know, you know, from your background, lawyers are not the first to adopt new technology. I would say that the dispute resolution profession somewhat lags even lawyers while in their adoption technology. So early days were slow. And then they all had to learn how to use Zoom as we were doing now because if they were going to continue providing any services during COVID pandemic, that was the only option. They were not interested in also learning more technology at the same time. So it was a very slow few first few years. And now that attitude has, I think, changed very dramatically in the last year. In 2025, for being in, we saw enormous change. Yeah, with AI particularly, but I think someone with the great recession 2008, more so sadly for all of the collateral damage, if you will, there was a lift for legal tech during COVID, understandably. And then now with AI spoken about often careless slave at sometimes with great great wisdom, when it comes to its use and illegal, another boost to legal tech. So whether it's kicking or screaming or with a big smile on their face, lawyers are, and I've always been a techie by hobby ever ever since, you know, I started practicing law soon thereafter. So for me, it was easy, but I'm astounded by how much more of a welcome there is, especially when I last two or three years. Yeah, you almost get the sense of people like in my feed in this field, they learn how to use Zoom, they find, and you know, there were a bit of few people using online video conferencing before that were almost, you know, almost banned from the practice right now, that was terrible. And then all of a sudden, maybe came the most popular, how did you do that? How do you do it? How can we, that's probably operate this. And then I think you almost the attitude of, hey, you know what, that technology actually does work, it really did help me with my practice. I wonder what else is out there. I mean, that seems to be that's a good way of putting it to cold last year. So with you now having four or five years, behind your back of running ADR notable, what other advice might you give a fellow startup leader at whatever state? in the legal tech space. - I'll tell you what, I'm not sure if I knew then what I know now, I may have been a little more hesitant about this startup, because I can contrast the startup of the credit card fraud project, which was called Uncertify company. It was eventually sold to American Express and I think American Express last year sold it to some private equity group. That product had an obvious, known, clear, unambiguous demand. - Yeah. - You could go into a company and say, your online sales is experiencing five, six, seven percent fraud. I can get that at the one or less, one percent or less. - And they can measure that ROI. - They can measure that immediately and you can figure out a price point that makes sense and off you go. This project, you find yourself spending a fair amount of time explaining to people why they need it. And that, I'm just saying what it would say to any founder, if you get into the marketplace and you have to spend time explaining why somebody needs something, think twice. Now, there are examples, nobody knew they needed an iPad and it certainly was a successful initiative. So I'm not saying don't do it, but I am certainly suggesting that you think about that a little bit more. If you have to explain the benefits of using your product, then it's gonna be a slow process. - Excellent, excellent. Advice, and of course with the iPad, that was a company had hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing budget and to put behind seating what the iPad was all about. - Exactly. Too often, most often startups, particularly the Eagle Tech startups don't have that sort of in timing. You know, in hindsight, when we were doing, when we were showing the prototype, we built the prototype in a product called InVision, which lets you do kind of a rapid, what appears to be operating software, but it's not, right? And you can use it for prototyping. And we were getting this reaction, oh my God, that is a great product. I wish they'd been there when I started, but I've got my own ways now and I probably wouldn't shift. And as an optimistic entrepreneur, you only heard the first half of that. (laughing) Right? And you didn't listen carefully enough to understand that the mindset was gonna be slow to get to a change. - And that too was very good advice. You have to listen to the customer, a prospective customer's entire statement. And in fact, pay attention more so to the less attractive things that the customer, the potential customer may be saying. - I mean, timing is everything. - Oh yeah, sure. - Today, there's a market, there's a man, things are great, but boy, there were some seriously lean years, you know, where I was carrying the salaries of like team out of my pocket for a few years without a lot of pickup in the marketplace. So, you know, if I'd listen, I might have hesitated, I might have waited a little while, I might have even spent some time, you know, trying to salt the mine as it were by getting out and the public and talking about the utility of having such a product. But yeah, a little bit of an early start. - Very, very good advice once again. Well, Gary, thank you so much for being a guest. I have to say, this is, especially the advice part, one of the more interesting and informative podcasts I've done. I can't say we have to meet someday face to face, we've already done that, but I do look forward to seeing you again at TLTF or before. And, you know, New York is a place where I'm only 30 minutes away, so if you ever get out here, do you bring me up and let's get together as I often say to my podcast, yes, but I especially want to say to you. - Well, I appreciate that. And listen, the reverse, anytime you want to come to someplace warm and sunny, I moved to the Colorado mountains and we haven't been suffering any of this. - We have very good friends in Denver and they were, we spoke to them on Sunday and they were saying, gee, Charlie, what are you doing out of that tunnel land of yours? - Yeah, I cleared the snow off this past week with my leaf blower, that's all I needed. - All right, and the same came out in my house face as south and everything else driving, you know, melted and dried up. - Yeah, plus you have those beautiful mountains out there. - And, Carrie, if people want to learn more about ADR notable and you, how do they find out about it? - Sure, well, you can certainly go to our website, which is simply adrnotable.com. We're also very active in LinkedIn, both personally and as the company, you can find us under those names. And we actually have a group in LinkedIn about technology in ADR that I'm happy to have anybody who's interested in growing, you know, their knowledge of technology and its utilization and dispute resolution, you know, we should let us know. It's an invitational group. And we have, you know, periodic discussions about topics that are relevant to that field. - I think that's, I'm a big fan of LinkedIn groups. There are a lot of LinkedIn groups, a lot by legal tech market-sized standards that those groups do focus on technology and the law, and I'm glad you mentioned that. I'll have to take a look at that myself. Let's get together again face to face soon. Enjoy the continued warm weather in Colorado and I can't wait to see you soon face to face. Once again, thank you for joining me. - Yeah, thanks again, I appreciate it. - Thank you. - Thank you for listening to the Legal Tech Startup Focus podcast. If you're interested in legal tech startups and enjoyed this podcast, please consider joining the free Legal Tech Startup Focus Community by going to www.legaltechstartupfocus.com and signing up again, thanks. (upbeat music)