Thomas J. Stipanowich is William H. Webster Chair in Dispute Resolution and Professor of Law at Pepperdine University, as well as Academic Director of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution. The Straus Institute was ranked number one among academic dispute resolution programs each of the last seven years by U.S. News & World Report. He was co-author, with Ian Macneil and Richard Speidel, of the groundbreaking five-volume treatise Federal Arbitration Law: Agreements, Awards & Remedies Under the Federal Arbitration Act, cited by the Supreme Court and many other federal and state courts, which was named Best New Legal Book by the Association of American Publishers. He also co-authored Resolving Disputes: Theory, Law and Practice, a law school course book supplemented by many practical exercises and illustrations on video; the second edition was just published. He is the author of many other much-cited publications on arbitration and dispute resolution, and has twice won the CPR Institute's First Prize for Professional Articles (1987 and 2009)--most recently for "Arbitration: The 'New Litigation.'" In 2008, he was given the D'Alemberte/Raven Award, the ABA Dispute Resolution Section's highest honor, for contributions to the field.

Amy Schmitz is the John Deaver Drinko-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. From 2016-2021 Professor Schmitz was the Elwood L. Thomas Missouri Endowed Professor of Law at the University of Missouri School of Law and the Center for Dispute Resolution. Previously she was a Professor at the University of Colorado School of Law for over 16 years. Prior to teaching, Professor Schmitz practiced law with large law firms in Seattle and Minneapolis, and served as a law clerk for the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.  Professor Schmitz teaches courses in Contracts, Lawyering, Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), AI, Data Analytics and the Law, Arbitration, International Arbitration, and Consumer Law. She has been heavily involved in ODR teaching and research for a long time and is a Fellow of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, as well as the Co-Chair of the ABA Technology Committee of the Dispute Resolution Section and the ODR Task Force.  She serves on the Association of American Law Schools Executive Committee on Commercial and Consumer Law, was an External Scientific Fellow of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg, and is a researcher with the ACT Project exploring AI and ODR. Professor Schmitz also hosts The Arbitration Conversation, a highly regarded podcast that has reached over 100 episodes. She has published over 60 articles in law journals and books, is a co-author of the leading casebook, Resolving Disputes: Theory, Practice and Law (Aspen/Wolters Kluwer 2021), the new book with Stipanowich, Arbitration: Theory, Practice and Law (Forthcoming Aspen/Wolters Kluwer 2022) and a book with C. Rule, The New Handshake: Online Dispute Resolution and the Future of Consumer Protection.