The Roadmap to Resolution

The Alternative Dispute Resolution is a highly unregulated industry that influences the outcomes of more than 32 million legal matters each year. The lack of regulation creates formal and informal barriers to limit access to the industry for lawyers and qualified professionals, particularly people of color. Like other parts of our justice system, lack of diversity impacts the equitable delivery of justice.  If Fourth Party were scaled, it could simplify the path for professionals to participate in the legal gig economy, respond to demand for culturally competent practitioners, and influence distribution of wealth within communities of color.

Ideally, participants in the ADR process should have the ability to select from a panel of neutrals that represent their unique background, experiences, and identities. In reality, less than a quarter of all registered ADR professionals are women and even fewer are people of color. While there are just 7,700 professionals are registered as ADR professionals (Bureau of Labor Statistics), many more individuals with a majority background are informally practicing ADR in corporations and government offices.  In fact, nearly 80% of all civil legal matters in the U.S. are resolved via the ADR process, impacting millions of individuals each year.

Researchers at the School of Law at Hofstra University found that lack of regulation coupled with informational, professional, social, and institutional barriers made it nearly impossible for underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to persist in the ADR field. Practicing ADR does not require a law degree, and their research suggests that solutions must center around providing viable networking and information sharing opportunities that help to establish clear entry and career paths. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for and interest in industry-specific, technology-based solutions for legal work. 

Fourth Party is a practice management software system for Alternative Dispute Resolution professionals with tools for customer relationship management, negotiations, continuous education, and networking. The software uses cloud computing technology to provide an industry specific data and customer management system that streamlines the negotiation process. Other tools for billing, scheduling, and reporting make managing the administrative tasks of entrepreneurship easier. By providing continuous education users are able to regularly upskill and earn credentials. Finally, the networking interface provides access to an information sharing community that will be essential to long-term success in the ADR field. Eventually the use of machine-learning within the system will provide predictive analytics to help users hone their individual practice and negotiation style. 

The legal profession is aging at an alarming rate. According the American Bar Association, in areas where senior lawyers predominate, such as ADR, new disciplinary and client protection concerns are emerging. Our solution targets lawyers and professionals interested in legal career pathways that don’t require advanced degrees.

Our solution focuses on providing skilled negotiators to help deliver justice to those negatively and disproportionately impacted by racial and socio-economic biases within the justice system.  Additionally, it disrupts the legal industries long held commitment to remaining low-tech, even as both practitioners and participants suffer.

Because of the unregulated nature of the field, research is limited. However, anecdotally we know that trust is an important factor for the resolution process, and cultural competency is an important tool for building trust with all people, especially those from marginalized and vulnerable communities.

 Fourth Party’s co-founder and CEO is an expert ADR professional who is working closely with other lawyers and credentialed professionals to test the interface and provide feedback at each stage of development. The solution is poised to address the technology preferences and educational needs of a younger and more diverse group of current and hopeful ADR professionals. 

The ADR industry is considered a ‘gated’ community. Limited access to career path modeling for younger individuals in underrepresented ethnic and racial groups makes entry even more challenging. Traditionally, entry into the ADR field required years of entry-level low pay work before one could access higher-paid opportunities. This is particularly unattractive to those already facing high debt and cultural pressure to achieve a “status” career.   Fourth Party invites diverse individuals to access high quality and affordable skill-building and training opportunities to accelerate entry and persistence in the ADR field through its intuitive and industry specific interface. 

2 full-time staff

6 contractors

Our approach to building a diverse, equitable and inclusive organization is similar to our approach to solving any problem: Do the work to find and bring the best minds possible to the table to create our solution. We are not interested in checking boxes, but rather unlocking new perspectives to build new products and make room to explore how our identities and socialization impact our decision making. The makeup of our test group also reflects this priority and our continuous commitment to evaluation and nimbleness will help us to to fulfil this priority.   

ADR practitioners have relied on historic thinking that low-tech = high quality practice. There is also a long held belief that gig work is not an industry fit for legal matters of this nature. Finally many informal practitioners are facilitating negotiations with little oversight, education, and often no pay. Fourth Party disrupts that thinking and positions technology to be a compliment to the people centered work of negotiation. We believe that by adding a "fourth party" through technology, rather than replacing people for the sake of automation, is the missing link to wildly adopting technology in the legal space.

Our industry specific tools help mediators to validate their decision making, manage administrative tasks,  and provide a road map for the resolution process for a variety of ADR professionals including new practitioners, experienced professionals looking to hone practice, and small firms.

By standardizing the ADR practice and attracting diverse practitioners, Fourth Party facilitates a more efficient and inclusive experience for all participants. 

Our practice management software relies on existing CRM cloud based technology with a new business model. We want to make the process of entry and navigating entrepreneurship in the ADR space as affordable as possible. By providing basic functionality at no cost, offering affordable and engaging continuous education options, and allows user to increase their use of technology through tiered subscriptions, we become pace setters influencing how people think about the resolution process and what it means to resolve a civil legal matter.

Practice management software is being used in areas of the legal industry, mostly focused on small firms for litigation and other basic administrative functions. CRMs are widely used at large and small firms. However, these systems require that the user already have a clear working knowledge of the litigation process and bring that knowledge to help optimize the use of the technology. There is not currently a CRM product in the ADR area that provides a framework or roadmap for the negotiation process - the component that most effects the participants and influences outcomes for either party. Our reporting system allows users to understand the trends in their practice using machine learning in order to continuously improve. 

We believe that if you bring limited perspectives to the building process then it can only have positive outcomes for a limited population. 

Our theory of change centers on the hypothesis that by providing high quality tools that attract diverse practitioners to the ADR process, that our product can influence more equitable outcomes for the participants. 

Our major activities at this stage focus on developing the most useful platform possible and promoting the use of the tools. We anticipate that as a result of the use of Fourth Party, practitioners will reduce the barriers to persistence as entrepreneurs in the ADR industry.

We will test the strength of our proposed links between the activities and our outcomes links by analyzing the 

We have the following goals for next year:

- raise funding to support a team of full-time developers and a full-time CTO

- Identify partners to introduce platform to women and other marginalized groups who have been disproportionately impacted by job loss during the Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis.

- develop basic communication functionality and credentialing process for standard ADR practice

For the next five years, we hope to achieve the following:

- scale Fourth Party to be the industry leader for ADR practice management and continuous education

- Increase representation by BIPOC in the ADR industry by 20%

- Integrate other technology tools that support virtual and remote legal gig work including booking and billing, practitioner rating system, and video conferencing. 

We need funding to continue developing an industry specific platform that practitioners actually want to use and to market our product to a diverse group of prospective practitioners to drive interest in and awareness of the industry.

Lack of research on the industry and standardization amongst practitioners will be a significant barrier to overcome in the next year. This barrier makes it difficult to estimate market size. We anticipate that allegiance to the way things have always been done will make information sharing and adoption a challenge for senior legal practitioners. 

We plan to overcome this obstacle by focusing on building the best platform, continuous improvement and strategic fundraising. 

We are in the initial stages of testing our Phase 1 & 2 development of the platform. We would like to collect more outcomes data related to the qualitative and experiential knowledge that impacts persistence in the ADR field. 

Gino Brogdon Jr is an attorney who owns The Brogdon Firm, a law firm established in 2014. In 2020, The Brogdon Firm was recognized as the 12th fastest growing business by University of Georgia Alumni. Gino accelerated his second income ADR practice to generate 7-figures in annual sales in 2019 and 2020. During the pandemic, Gino has sustained a full-time schedule of bookings for mediation services by pivoting his practice to a virtual format.

Melissa R. Brogdon, is a Certified Fundraising Executive who owns a grant writing company, Campbell Impact. Melissa has 15 years of project management experience where she focused on donor experience and the integration of CRM's and other SAAS platforms to optimize fundraising outcomes. Melissa earned a M.S.Ed from University of Pennsylvania focused on Education, Culture, and Society. 

Both founders are experienced entrepreneurs. Working together for the last two years at the Brogdon Firm has helped them understand their unique strengths - for Gino it is executive leadership and industry knowledge, for Melissa it is research and customer experience. As HBCU alumni, they leverage their robust networks of Morehouse and Spelman graduates to crowdsource solutions.

Currently, we are members of the inaugural cohort for Collab Capital's Prep School for Founders, founded by Jewel Solomon Burks - Head of Google for Startups -US. The cohort focuses on preparing for fundraising and skill building for black founders.

Our business model focuses on entrepreneur support.

We are using a value-based pricing model with tiered pricing for individuals and organizations. Individual users can access basic platform features with premium subscription options. Additionally, for every matter that Fourth Party processes, a flat fee will be assessed.  Individuals and Organizations can access API integrations through a subscription. 

We are still calculating our projected anticipated revenue, cash flow break-even, and our 3-5 year projections.  

Our path to financial sustainability will be through two major revenue streams, grants and raising investment capital. 

In the long term, our revenue streams will be from the selling of product via the Fourth Party platform.

To date we have self-funded Fourth Party. We are launching a friends and family round in January 2021. 

We have bootstrapped our work to date with a $75,000 personal investment from the co-founders in 2020.

We seek to raise Angel, VC, and grant funding to support the development of Fourth Party. Our goal is to raise $825,000 in 2021.

We anticipate our fixed costs in 2021 to be $680,000. 

We plan to raise $825,000 in 2021.

2021 estimated costs:

Full time startup developer (3) = $270,000

Designer costs = $25,000

Legal retainer = $25,000

Marketing/ sales consultant = $150,000

Operations staff = $100,000

3-month runway in 2022 = $160,000

2021 Milestones:

Q1: Beta Testing, Phase 2 Development

Q2: 50% funds raised, 100 testers

Q3: Phase 2 Testing, Basic Features Launch, Marketing/Sales Strategy Launch

Q4: 100% funds raised, 250 users

The Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US Challenge provides the foundation for organizations like Fourth Party to produce useful solutions that impact marginalized communities. While we focused on the dimension of providing high quality education and tools, we see ourselves as a technology company that enables inclusion in the ADR industry first. We are committed to delivering tools that simplify the administrative tasks that make managing a full-time or part-time ADR practice less attractive. Our marketing strategy is based on building trust through educating customers and equipping them with the tools to sustain their practice. Therefore, we are focused on building the best platform to help people hone their unique negotiation style and manage a professional practice more easily.

Our other opportunity is our ability to educate the general public on the impact mediation has in the civil justice system, particularly how it impacts outcomes for marginalized communities. Most people don’t know that 80% of all legal matters are resolved through ADR. So, if we help to make the process more transparent and its impacts more tangible, then we create more demand for diversity, innovation and competition within the industry. We believe that this opportunity will help us achieve this priority. 

Because of the unregulated nature of the industry we believe that we will need significant support in the area of legal and regulatory matters and marketing. 

We are actively seeking partnership with incubators and accelerator programs that can help us to refine our business model and strategy for deployment of the product.