Participants' relationship in ODR: legal discourse as social practice.

In ‘Participants' relationship in Online Dispute Resolution: legal discourse as social practice’ OLGA DENTI and MICHELA GIORDANO examine ODR procedures, i.e. where parties, instead of meeting in courtrooms or before arbitrators and mediators, attempt to resolve their disputes by reaching an agreement online, or by presenting the case to an online arbitral tribunal or a cybercourt. The authors stress the centrality of communication in ODR, especially in terms of delivery and the devices used to facilitate communication between the disputants and a third party. Denti and Giordano point out that if the public readership dimension is often absent from legislation insofar as ordinary citizens have little direct interest in legal minutiae, in private transactions the parties tend to feel directly involved in trying to find a solution on which both parties can agree. Hence discoursal resources and the relationship between participants are of crucial importance. The authors assert that analysing discourse as social practice involves highlighting contextual features such as the participants’ identities, the social structures, as well as the professional relationships that are likely to be preserved or transformed by a particular genre. The authors investigate the dialogic relationship of the ODR provider and the reader/user in the texts, created and fortified by adopting specific linguistic strategies including the rhetorical use of pronominal expressions for direct address, the pragmatic adoption of modality and of spoken or colloquial features, avoiding where possible archaic expressions, passives, nominalization and redundant expressions or phraseology, but also through the use of multimodal tools supplied by modern digital communication.