National Arbitration Forum

Type: Privately held
Industry: Legal
Founded: 1986
Headquarters: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Country: USA
Employees: 1600
Website: adrforum.com
Facebook: National Arbitration Forum
LinkedIn: Natioal Arbitration Forum
Key People
Kristine Dorraine, Internet Legal Counsel

National Arbitration Forum (FORUM) is a dispute resolution company which is composed of more than 1, 600 arbitrators and mediators who are legal practitioners and former judges located in United States and 35 other countries worldwide. FORUM is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

History edit

The National Arbitration Forum was founded in 1986 by a group of legal experts- litigators, mediators and former judges. The group leveraged their knowledge on court processes, information technology and law to create a broad array of alternative dispute resolution (ADR)programs to offer the integrity of the court system with more choices and control.[1]

Mission edit

The FORUM aims to provide a fair, efficient, and effective system for the resolution of commercial and civil disputes in the United States and worldwide.

Services edit

The company provides arbitration and mediation services for businesses in the United States and other countries all over the world. Forum also provides additional ADR services which include Early Neutral Evaluation, Settlement Conferences, Complex Panels, Special Masters, Online Resolution, Expedited Arbitration, Expedited Mediation and International Arbitration.[2]

National Arbitration Forum and ICANN edit

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved FORUM to provide resolution services for domain name disputes around the world, under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP.[3] Since ICANN's approval,there more than 16,000 domain name disputes filed with the National Arbitration Forum's state-of-the-art case management system optimized by Forthright,[4] an an innovator in the design, automation, and management of processing solutions for complex regulatory and legal compliance programs.[5]

In 2010, the FORUM was approved by ICANN to handle disputes on the .co country code top-level domain (ccTLD). Representatives of the company also attended the ICANN meetings in Brussels and Cartagena to follow potential expansion of the gTLD space.[6]

The National Arbitration Forum provides its comments to various ICANN programs which include:[7]

  1. Implementation of eUDRP on January 20, 2009
  2. IRT Final Recommendations July 6, 2009
  3. RPM's for New gTLDs on November 20, 2009
  4. Uniform Rapid Suspension System on March 29, 2010
  5. Trademark Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Procedure on March 30, 2010
  6. Registry Restrictions Dispute Resolution Procedure
  7. Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy on February 11, 2011


References edit