McKinsey helps pioneer an AI-native approach in dispute resolution

September 17, 2025 The American Arbitration Association^®-International Centre for Dispute Resolution^® (AAA-ICDR^®) announced the upcoming launch of its AI arbitrator today, developed in collaboration with QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey.

The AI arbitrator effectively tech-enables the approach to alternative dispute resolution, accelerating case management and legal reasoning and operating within a "human-in-the-loop" framework that validates every output. With step-by-step oversight by an arbitrator, the AI tool can review filings and supporting documents, break down claims into their component arguments, and generate draft awards grounded in decades of case data and experience.

Beginning in November 2025, the solution will first be deployed for eligible documents-only construction cases, an area where speed and efficiency are essential.

"This marks a significant step toward transforming dispute resolution into a faster process that's also more accessible," says Bridget Mary McCormack, president and CEO of the AAA-ICDR. "The legal industry has long been cautious about adopting new technologies. But as demand for fair, efficient, and accessible dispute resolution grows, innovation is no longer optional. It is essential."

The AAA-ICDR approached QuantumBlack after recognizing the potential disruption-and opportunity-generative and agentic AI and other technology could have on the legal industry.

QuantumBlack collaborated with the AAA-ICDR to reimagine arbitration as an AI-native workflow, rather than an incremental improvement to legacy systems and processes. "While technology was the 'shiny new object,' we had to transform the entire business, shifting from a waterfall to agile operating model, modernizing the tech stack to make it AI-native, and generating a new sales motion to educate and reach customers with this AI arbitrator offering," says Stephen Xu, a senior director of product management for QuantumBlack.

Our collaboration was rooted in three foundational priorities:

• Building a data foundation. Lawyers and dispute resolution experts from the AAA-ICDR annotated more than a thousand prior construction cases, creating a high-quality dataset of arguments, evidence, and decisions and an accompanying reasoning framework. This data-driven approach has also created an enduring foundation for continuously evaluating and improving the tool's performance.
• Embedding domain expertise. QuantumBlack worked alongside arbitrators and industry experts to understand how they approach cases, assess evidence, and break down claims to codify that knowledge into prompts and agents, enabling the tool to reflect how arbitrators think. That expertise was then built into the system step by step, so it followed real arbitration logic, rather than generic AI reasoning.
• Driving adoption-and reach. AAA Construction Panel arbitrators and attorneys at AAA-ICDR were engaged from the start of the process, even as some acknowledged doubts about the efficiency of an AI tool. Addressing those doubts and meeting the team's needs shaped the design and was a core part of the process and of building trust.

The AI arbitrator will help fulfill one of the AAA-ICDR's core missions: to provide efficient access to dispute resolution. The tool is expected to help deliver dispute resolution faster at a lower cost, based on extensive testing and pilots by AAA and legal experts. In addition, transparency throughout the process offered arbitrators greater confidence in the outcome.

While the tool will initially focus on eligible documents-only construction cases, the AAA-ICDR plans to expand support to additional industries, dispute types, and higher-value claims in the future.

"This collaboration is a clear example of how AI can be responsibly deployed in expert-driven domains," says McKinsey partner Eric Goldberg. "By combining agentic AI capabilities with decades of AAA-ICDR experience and data, we have built a system that protects the integrity of the arbitration process, while making dispute resolution as efficient and accessible as possible in today's fast-paced world."

To request a demo of our agentic AI platform, agents at scale, reach out to [email protected]