Court-connected ODR has already shown itself capable of dramatically improving access to justice by eliminating barriers rooted in the fact that courts traditionally resolve disputes only during certain hours, in particular physical places, and only through face-to-face proceedings. Given the centrality of courthouses to our system of justice, too many Americans have discovered their rights are too difficult or costly to exercise. As court-connected ODR systems spread, offering more inclusive types of dispute resolution services, people will soon find themselves with the law and the courts at their fingertips. But robust access to justice requires more than just raw, low-cost opportunities to resolve disputes. Existing ODR platforms seek to replicate in-person procedures, simplifying and clarifying steps where possible, but litigants without representation still proceed without experience, expertise, guardrails, or the ability to gauge risk or likely outcomes. Injecting ODR with a dose of data science has the potential to address many of these shortfalls. Enhanced ODR is unlikely to render representation obsolete, but it can dramatically reduce the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” and, on some dimensions—where machines can outperform humans—next generation platforms may be a significant improvement.

Technology is often seen as having transformational capacity to improve societal institutions, and the judiciary has not been an exception to this trend. For a number of years, courts around the world have invested in digital uplift projects. Beyond the routine use of technology to improve judicial systems, which is widely accepted and largely self-explanatory, many jurisdictions are increasingly investigating more sophisticated applications. Governments and courts are asking whether and to what extent machine learning techniques and other artificial intelligence applications should play a role in assisting tribunals and judiciary in decision making. In this chapter, we ask how these new uses of technology might, in turn, impact judicial values and judges’ own sense of themselves, and even transform the judicial role in contemporary societies. We do this through a focused examination of core judicial values, namely transparency and accountability, independence, impartiality, diversity and efficiency and how they may be either supported or undermined by increasing technologization.