Hi Doug, On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 6:24 PM, Doug Isenberg <Doug@giga.law> wrote:
I'm unaware of URS cases being "batched in groups of 5 cases per panelist." (Any examples to support that statement would be appreciated.) And, given the relatively few URS cases that are being decided, I don't think that could practically even be an option. Examiners at the Forum have issued 96 URS determinations so far in 2018, over 220 days. So, that’s less than one determination every other day. At that rate, batching seems impossible. Finally, even if cases were batched, presumably they would involve different parties, different marks, different facts, etc., so I don't know that batching would make anything more efficient.
Thanks for your message. I couldn't find the reference in the RPM PDP email archives, so conveivably the topic of URS panelist rotation wasn't previously covered in this PDP. However, I did a broader search (as I'm sure I remembered this batching process from somewhere!), and found that we did discuss this topic in the IGO PDP, and the actual number of URS cases per batch was 4 (not 5 as I had thought), see page 27 of: https://gnso.icann.org/sites/default/files/filefield_46643/transcript-igo-in... "Kristine Dorrain: Yeah, absolutely. Kristine from National Arbitration Forum for the record. So for URS our panelists are selected by computer rotation. Now there is some manual override when it comes to languages etcetera but we are doing our doing our absolute best to let the computer just do its job and select the panelists. Because the low fees of the URS are so incredibly low the - what we try to do is send complaints to URS panelists in batches. So we are trying to send four cases to a single panelist so they can kind of work on them and block out some time to work on them. And then move on to the next panelist and then four cases go to the next panelist. So we're working through a straight rotation, like I said, that the computer generates for us....." Obviously this was from 2014, when Kristine was still at NAF. Procedures might have changed since then. Sincerely, George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/