The Commercial ADR Blog reflects the high-quality writing and insightful analysis that we have come to expect from Victoria’s Settle It Now blog, and the IP ADR Blog.  It also has a very pleasing layout and uses pictures very effectively — another characteristic of Victoria’s blogs, especially Settle It Now.  In fact, every time I check out Settle It Now or Commercial ADR, I make a mental note to learn how to use effectively the pictures function in WordPress!   (By the way, another blog that uses pictures effectively is Disputing, Karl Bayer’s and Victoria VanBuren’s excellent blog.)  

Few in the ADR business are as indefatigable as Victoria Pynchon, but our friend, and LinkedIn Commercial and Industry Arbitration and Mediation Group Co-Manager Don Philbin is in her league.  Don’s latest contribution to the world of ADR is the ADR Highlight Reel, which you can read here or access via the link in our blogroll.  Don avidly follows more than 100 blogs, many or most of which touch on ADR, or ADR-related topics, like brain science.  Don traditionally flagged articles that he thought were particularly interesting and distributed copies of them by snail mail, and later, by e mail.  With the advent of Twitter, Don set up a system that allows him to tag articles, which, along with a brief description, are automatically posted on Twitter via an RSS feed.  The ADR Hightight Reel consolidates in a single blog post the links to all of Don’s recommended ADR articles for a given period. 

Don’s is an incredibly valuable resource.  Many of us spend hours surfing the web or plowing through Google Reader to keep abreast of ADR-related developments.  Don does all of that work for us and makes it available in one highly accessible format.  Even if you already follow Don on Twitter, and receive his recommendations on a real time basis, article by article, having those recommendations in one spot is a real big plus. 

I suppose a skeptic might question whether he or she should rely on a third person to cull through the 100s of articles pertinent to ADR regularly posted in the blogosphere.  But I can assure readers that Don casts a very wide net with a fairly narrow mesh (I apologize — Sometimes I simply cannot resist fishing-related metaphors, even so-so ones like this!).  The chances of Don not featuring a truly relevant ADR article in his ADR Highlight Reel are, in my humble opinion and experience, slim to none.

Let us all extend our heartfelt thanks to Victoria Pynchon and Don Philbin for their wonderful, new contributions to the ADR blogosphere.

I “tweet” mostly on reinsurance- and arbitration-related matters, but I also enjoy conversing with others on a variety of other legal and non-legal topics.  I also find that Twitter allows me to keep interested readers posted on case law developments that we may not cover here at the Forum.  I usually summarize the case in 115 characters or less and include a link.  That it is considerably easier to do than writing a full-blown blog post on the case, complete with a critical analysis!   These ”micro-blog” reports  are usually posted the day the case is decided.  Finally, I ”re-tweet” tweets I believe others may find useful and use an RSS service that automatically announces new Forum blog posts shortly after they are posted to the web. 

If you are an ADR, insurance or reinsurance professional or industry person, chances are I will follow you when I find you (or you find me).  I also follow people that offer interesting tweets and links to information on a fairly wide range of legal and non-legal subjects, including healthcare reform and plain old good humor.

If you wish to follow me, my Twitter handle is @PhilLoreeJr (here).  And while I have yet to update my Twitter profile background to match that of the Forum and the Loree & Loree website, I plan to do that soon….