Welcome to RSI’s step-by-step guide to designing, managing, improving or evaluating your court ADR program. We designed this guide so that you can either move through all the steps, or you can skip around to just the sections you need.

Use this guide…

• for any form of court ADR. The guide is intended to be used with many forms of ADR, such as mediation, arbitration, early neutral evaluation and parenting coordination.
• at any stage of a court ADR program. Although the guide refers to “developing” a program, you will find help here whether you are developing a new program from scratch, expanding an existing program, or trying to breathe life into a struggling program.
• wherever you are in the process of developing your program. If you already know what ADR process you will use, you can still benefit from the ideas in the earlier steps. It is unlikely that any program development effort will move seamlessly through these steps. Use the information in a way that works for your program.
• as part of individual or committee activities. Download sections for your own reference. Email them to your colleagues. Print them out and take them to your next planning meeting.

Stay Tuned for More Guidance

In the future, RSI will post more chapters about how to design, manage and evaluate your court ADR program. Here are the future topics:

• Write Your Court Rules
• Design a System to Monitor Your Program
• Create Your Program Forms
• Launch Your Program
• Manage Your Program
• Evaluate Your Program

A note for federal courts:

This guide is written primarily with state courts in mind. Some sections of this guide will be less applicable to those working in federal courts than other sections. For example, you will need to adapt the advice about funding sources, legal environment, court rules and documents. Other sections, such as leadership, goal-setting, process design, training, monitoring, management, evaluation and launch will be applicable for the most part.