Economical Litigation Agreements
for Commercial Contracts as a Means of Reducing Civil Litigation Costs
In 2009, CPR assembled a group to explore Economical Litigation Agreements (ELA) as a means of reducing civil litigation costs.
The model agreement was fine-tuned over the course of a year by an informal focus group of in-house attorneys from Abbott Laboratories, Bechtel Group Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., General Electric Co. and Microsoft Corp. and others. One of the agreement’s major innovations is the use of an arbitrator to enforce a discovery contract. The model ELA debuted on April 15, 2010 at "American Justice at a Crossroads: A Public & Private Crisis," a conference co-sponsored by Pepperdine's Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution and the CPR Institute in Malibu, California. Subsequently, CPR, through it's e-discovery Committee assembled a Panel of Neutrals able to handle ELA proceedings. More recently, the Commercial part of the Courts of New York adopted a Rule 9 based on the work prioneered by this Committee. This group was chaired by Dan Winslow, then of Duane Morris LLP.
Publication:
Frequently Asked Questions:
Frequently Asked Questions about Economical Litigation Agreements
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