Until January 27, I hadn’t planned to develop an AI tool for dispute resolution .  That changed when I Zoomed into a program where Susan Guthrie showed how AI could be used in mediation.  A brief conversation at the end shifted from mediating disputes to improving writing – and that’s when a light bulb lit up in my head.

I soon created the RPS Negotiation and Mediation Coach (“RPS Coach”) tool, which is an outgrowth of the Real Practice Systems (RPS) Project.  Although I originally focused on developing a tool just for writing, I quickly realized that it had many other potential uses, especially to help people deal with disputes.

RPS theory is designed to help attorneys and mediators help their clients make good decisions in negotiation and mediation.  The goal is for parties to be as knowledgeable, confident, and assertive as possible when making decisions.

RPS Coach was “trained” on almost all of my substantive writings.  It absorbed the RPS checklists, key dispute resolution resources, and a generous helping of practical theory – giving it a distinctive perspective compared to generic AI tools.

It is designed to address users’ needs with clear, practical suggestions understandable to both experts and laypersons.  It creates checklists and strategies tailored to specific situations.  It asks clarifying questions and invites users to ask follow-up questions.

This document describes the elements of RPS Coach, how it differs from off-the-shelf AI tools, and why you might want to test it out.

What Can RPS Coach Do For You?  A Lot, It Turns Out

RPS Coach is designed to help many different users perform numerous tasks including but not limited to:

  • Attorneys planning strategy, preparing clients, and anticipating tough spots
  • Mediators preparing for mediation sessions and generating creative options
  • Disputing parties looking for help to make better-informed decisions
  • ADR program administrators developing rules, policies, and materials
  • Educators and trainers crafting syllabi, exercises, and simulations
  • Students and trainees sharpening their thinking and skills

Educators can use RPS Coach during class discussions.  They also can use it to design and apply rubrics analyzing students’ exams and papers.  Students and trainees can use it to help prepare for and participate in simulations and to write course papers.

Want to See if You Can Benefit From RPS Coach?

Check it out.  Here’s a link to access RPS Coach.  To use it, you must subscribe to ChatGPT, possibly using a free subscription.  Be sure to read the description so you understand how it works.  It’s still a work in progress – and I’d love your feedback.

Live Field Test

Curious how it performs with real-world issues?  Hiro Aragaki, the director of the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution at UC Law San Francisco, kindly invited me to give a talk where I demonstrated the RPS Coach.  After describing RPS theory and the RPS Coach, I invited people to pose questions to test the tool.

Hiro started by describing a case he mediated in which the parties reached agreement on the substance of their disagreement but deadlocked about a confidentiality provision to include in a mediated agreement.

A student asked about how one could apply experiences from the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund to issues arising from the recent LA fires.

Another student asked if arbitration law allows companies to extend arbitration clauses to disputes unrelated to the original agreement.

Here’s the chat, the powerpoint of my presentation, and a 50-minute YouTube video of the session.

So What Did We Learn?

Mediation Coaching and De-Briefing.  RPS Coach offered solid suggestions to handle the deadlock over the confidentiality clause.  Hiro had tried some of these ideas but not others.  That’s exactly the kind of “second brain” support the tool was designed to provide.

In this situation, RPS Coach essentially de-briefed the case.  If Hiro used it during a mediation session, it might have suggested some options that he could have discussed with the parties.

Parties also can use the tool in mediated and unmediated negotiations.  They might use it individually, in consultations with their attorneys, in private sessions with mediators (aka caucus), and/or in joint mediation sessions.

Here’s an intriguing recent study, When AI Joins the Table:  How Large Language Models Transform Negotiations, finding that when both parties used AI, it produced “84.4% higher joint gains compared to non-assisted negotiations.  This improvement came with increased information sharing (+28.7%), creative solution development (+58.5%), and value creation (+45.3%).”

Assistance Analyzing Issues and Writing Papers.  RPS Coach also did a great job developing insights about compensation related to the LA fires based on the experience of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund.  The first prompt was pretty general, and RPS Coach provided a list of practical resources for injured parties to seek benefits.  I asked a follow-up question about dispute system design insights from the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund experience that would inform policy makers about how best to deal with the LA fires, and it produced a helpful outline suitable for writing a paper.

To get the best out of RPS Coach – or any AI tool – you may need to play a bit of conversational ping pong.  AI tools may not “understand” what you are asking, and they often provide fairly short answers.  Ask clarifying questions and test their assumptions.

I can attest that RPS Coach is a very good editor.  I have fed it drafts and taken many of its good suggestions.  Indeed, I have repeated the process with several successive drafts, and it provided incremental improvements each time.

Using the Right Tool.  RPS Coach provided a plausible sounding response to the question about arbitration law, but there was some question whether it was accurate, particularly some of the citations.

RPS Coach is not the right tool to answer this question.  It was designed to help with negotiation and mediation, not arbitration and not about legal rules.  Despite its lack of training, it provided some plausible responses presumably based on material on the internet.  I assume that AI tools in Westlaw and Lexis would provide much better responses about arbitration law.

AI tools can provide good responses – and people always should evaluate the responses and use their judgment in deciding what to do with them.

Build Your Own AI Tool.  Many readers of this blog have written valuable publications that you can use to train your own tool.  For example, some of you are arbitration experts and could develop your own tools that would have provided better responses to the arbitration law question.  You’ve already done the hard part – writing useful, insightful material.  Why not put it to work?  You can create a tool solely for your own use or make it available to others.

Coming Attractions (Sorry, No Popcorn)

Developing RPS Coach has been quite an education for me.  And it’s not over.  I plan to write more blog posts about what I learn in the process and how you might benefit from RPS Coach in your work.

Stay tuned.

PS.  Guess who gave great suggestions for editing this post?