Picture a small trader in a district town who is owed money by a supplier. He opens an app on his phone, types out his complaint, and answers a few questions. Within minutes, the screen offers him a settlement, with a bright green “Accept” button underneath. Is that an offer or a ruling? Can he speak to a real person before he taps? Nobody has told him. Does the online dispute resolution (ODR) ensure justice always? These are some quiet dangers of ODR. Convenience often turns into disadvantages without anyone noticing.
Online dispute resolution, a dispute resolution system that resolves disputes through digital technology and the internet in place of traditional in-person courts, is increasing all over the world due to rapid e-commerce growth, high costs of traditional litigation, public court digitization e platforms, and several other reasons. The system, in which the parties file cases, share documents, communicate via messaging, and work with a neutral third party (and the “fourth party” technology) completely and remotely, has resolved hundreds of millions of disputes in many countries, including developed countries. Moreover, the use of ODR will probably rapidly increase in the future in dispute settlement, though it has various limitations, including technical, operational, and enforcement challenges, in a broader sense.
I do not want to be unfair to the idea. Anyone who has watched a small civil case drag through adjournments knows what the present system costs in time, travel, and money, and Bangladesh is still looking for ways to widen access to justice. Digital services could ease some of that, especially for modest civil disputes. But speed is not the same thing as fairness. A quick process earns trust only if people can understand what is happening to them and push back when something looks wrong.
The first limit of online dispute resolution (ODR) appears before a case is heard: being connected is not the same as being able to participate. This exists, though modern systems can provide considerable assistance, and some place unresolved disputes before independent human adjudicators. Difficulty reading legal language adds another barrier, even when the interface works perfectly. India’s ODR policy report recognizes infrastructure and digital literacy as obstacles.
For those who enter, resources remain unequal. Clients do not arrive with the same bargaining strength in ODR. There is a further concern where a private provider depends on repeat business from one side. That relationship does not establish bias, but it does make independence harder for the other party to trust.
At the moment of settlement, those inequalities become especially visible. Consider someone accepting a reduced payment because rent is due and continuing the dispute would mean another week of uncertainty. The acceptance may be informed and legally valid, yet it reveals little about whether the amount reflects the strength of the claim. Faster negotiation can shorten that person’s ordeal without removing the pressure behind the compromise. Nor are negotiation, facilitated settlement, and adjudication interchangeable; ODR covers different procedures. Where their boundaries are unclear, a user may misunderstand when participation becomes commitment.
The account that reaches the decision-maker can be narrower than the dispute itself. An unpaid invoice fits neatly into a form, but a payment made after threats may not. Written exchanges can miss context, while a remote hearing may leave an adjudicator unaware that someone else is listening or influencing an answer. These are risks, not inevitable features of online proceedings. Flexible evidence rules and skilled human participation can substantially reduce them. Still, digital records do not automatically establish authenticity, and relevant documents may remain under the stronger party’s control. The Council of Europe’s ODR guidelines address evidence and hearings. When the procedure fails to expose missing context or disputed evidence, apparent clarity can produce an outcome that rests on only part of the story.
The imbalance of power is where the ODR gets serious. A company that handles hundreds of disputes learns a platform the way a regular customer learns his bank’s app. It knows which prompts matter, what evidence will be asked for, and roughly where cases tend to settle. The individual on the other side is usually there once, tired, and mostly hoping the whole thing will go away. The ODR procedure can look perfectly neutral but still favor whoever uses it every day.
Even a fair outcome may leave the claimant with unfinished work. A settlement, an arbitral award and a tribunal order draw their force from different legal arrangements; putting them online does not give them identical enforceability. The Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT), for example, explains that it cannot enforce an order on a successful party’s behalf. Enforcement can require court filing. Cross-border disputes may add questions about jurisdiction, recognition, and the location of assets.
Where automated tools influence an outcome, another gap opens between what a system calculates and what a person can contest. Besides, data governance is a part of fairness, not an afterthought. But the information needed to prove a claim creates a different vulnerability. Dispute files are intimate things. Bank records, identity documents, and sensitive allegations may become part of a digital file whose exposure would cause harm beyond the original dispute.
ODR is improving due to new technologies and legislative support, shifting from basic video conferencing to highly efficient and legally sound digital ecosystems. But its limitations need to be further addressed. ODR should provide expanded and more intuitive access to its clients, but this needs to be balanced against systemic trade-offs. While ODR offers immense benefits like lower costs, faster processing times, and cross-border accessibility, the lack of uniform legal oversight creates structural risks for its users on many occasions. But ODR regulatory measures are actively required and need to be strengthened.
For Bangladesh, which, under its primary statutory laws, does not explicitly recognize or formally regulate ODR, a credible approach may begin with clearly defined disputes and a clear legal basis, preserving practical help and an accessible alternative for those unable to participate online. Independent assessment should examine bargaining inequalities, provider conflicts, and automated recommendations, alongside privacy, public accountability and workable routes to review and enforcement.
Some modern ODR systems have already addressed much of this. The task should be to establish how well those protections work for the people using them. Success deserves to be measured beyond cases closed so that people could present their claims fairly and obtain the remedies they were promised. Ensuring a good online procedure will help get online justice.
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