Our friends Victoria Pynchon and Don Philbin recently contributed to the ADR blogosphere some excellent, new resources. First, Victoria has transferred stewardship of her IP ADR Blog — which focuses on arbitration, mediation and negotiation issues pertinent to intellectual property disputes — to our friend Professor Eric van Ginkel, and started a new blog with a broader scope: the Commercial ADR Blog. The blog’s tag line is “Business Solutions to Justice Issues,” and, as its title suggests, it covers the entire spectrum of issues pertinent to commercial ADR. You can visit it here, or access it via our blogroll.
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.
