Hawaii's Court-Annexed Arbitration Program : Final Evaluation Report

This is the fourth and final article of a series of four articles describing the evaluation results for Hawaii’s mandatory Court-Annexed Arbitration Program (CAAP), a program with a jurisdictional limit $150,000, much higher than most other state programs. This evaluation examines the effectiveness of Hawaii's Court Annexed Arbitration Program (CAAP), which is a mandatory, non-binding procedure for tort cases valued at $150,000 or less. The major goals of the program are to reduce litigant costs, reduce time to disposition, and improve or maintain the level of satisfaction for litigants and attorneys. Hawaii's Court-Annexed Arbitration Program has reduced pretrial discovery; reduced litigation costs for private litigants, increased the pace of litigation, provided litigants with a fair, just, and satisfactory 'day-in-court,' encouraged early and less expensive settlements, increased the percentage of cases that terminate each year, and may have reduced the number of trials. Through comparison of cases randomly assigned to CAAP to those cases that went through traditional litigation, the study found that under the arbitration program, the average plaintiff saves $496 in discovery expenses, and the average defendant saves $266. Lawyers' fees are on average $159 less per defendant whose case is sent to arbitration. CAAP cases also experience quicker disposition times, reaching disposition almost four months earlier than non-CAAP cases. Most lawyers who participated in the program were satisfied with the program and with the arbitrators