Online dispute resolution in family disputes in England & Wales – lessons
Grant: £15,978
March 29, 2017
Between September 2015 to October 2016 Relate piloted the prototype Online Family Dispute Resolution (OFDR) service it had built by adapting the Dutch Rechtwijzer model. During this period they carried out:
- Live trials with 15 couples currently going through divorce;
- User tests with 20 individuals <3 years post separation; and
- Reviews from a wide range of practitioners, expert users, academics and policy makers.
Relate also worked intensively on determining a sustainable social business model to allow the service to scale.
Unfortunately, despite the successful pilot, Relate have not managed to secure the delivery and investment partnerships required for the public launch of the ODFR service. They now aim to disseminate the lessons learnt from the pilot, focused on key findings on service users, practitioner involvement, and service sustainability; and to identify remaining innovation gaps in each of these areas.
In this their objectives are twofold:
- To exchange insights with other organisations seeking to develop new models of support for family separation (and other dispute areas), so that innovation and development can progress at a faster rate; and
- To identify any future collaborators and investors with whom to progress the OFDR programme.
| Increase Public Understanding | Advance High Quality Thinking | Increase Access to Employment |
| General Public | ||
| Implications of Brexit | Legal Needs in Healthcare Settings | Influence the Online Court |
| Develop Robust Evidence Base | ||
| Understand Role of Technology | ||
| Law Reform, Policy and Regulation | ||
| Communications to Disseminate Learning | ||
