Is Your Dispute System Ready for 2026? Here Are the 2025 Gaps You Can’t Repeat

In 2025, businesses across sectors, from banking and insurance to e-commerce and services, faced a common challenge: “dispute resolution systems burdened by delays, inefficiencies, and rising costs.” Despite growing recognition of digital alternatives, many organisations still rely on paper-heavy, fragmented procedures.

As we look to 2026, changing regulatory expectations, customer demand for speed, and evolving risk environments mean that having a robust, tech-enabled dispute-resolution system is no longer optional; it’s imperative.

Below is a research-backed breakdown of the structural gaps exposed in 2025, and how companies can avoid repeating them next year.

1. Manual & Fragmented Processes

“A Drag on Speed and Efficiency”

Here’s what research shows

• According to NITI Aayog’s 2020-21 ODR policy report, one of the core benefits of ODR is to reduce the heavy burden on courts and litigants by offering a cost-effective, quicker alternative to traditional litigation. By eliminating the need for physical presence and paper-heavy workflows, such as travel, hearings, and clerical handling, ODR systems cut down on time and cost substantially.
  
• The same report finds that court pendency in many Indian states remains a critical problem: in numerous states/UTs, cases in district courts often remain pending for five years or more under traditional court-centric dispute resolution.
  
• A recent industry-wide survey by Baker McKenzie found that in 2025, technology-related issues, especially data privacy, cybersecurity, and digital transformation failures, are the top concern for in-house legal teams at multinationals. Around 45% of respondents cited cybersecurity & data privacy as one of the biggest types of disputes they expect to face. 

What did that mean in 2025

Many enterprises continued to rely on manual, human-driven workflows, often spread across disconnected tools (such as spreadsheets, email threads, legacy CRMs, and local file systems). This caused delays, human error, duplication of effort, and a lack of tracking, and made compliance auditing cumbersome.

What Needs to Change in 2026

“A Single Connected System That Manages Every Step of a Dispute”

Organisations should stop using patchwork digital tools and move to a single unified ODR system that includes everything – case intake, document management, scheduling, hearings, communication, audit-trail & compliance logs. Overall, this will help reduce delays, improve transparency, and mitigate data privacy/security risks.

2. Court Backlogs & Structural Judicial Delays 

“It’s Something ODR Is Built to Address”

Here’s what studies indicate

• According to a 2025 analysis published in the Indian Journal of Law and Legal Research (IJLLR), Indian courts are facing a backlog of over 52 million pending cases. The report asserts that at current disposal rates, clearing this backlog would take centuries.
  
• Lower/subordinate courts, which handle the bulk of cases, bear nearly 87% of this backlog, reflecting severe structural strain. 

What 2025 exposed

With such overwhelming pendency, many disputes, especially lower-value commercial or consumer claims, suffered excessive delays, sometimes stretching to years. For businesses and customers alike, this created uncertainty, inefficiency, and damage to trust.

What Needs to Change in 2026

“Shift everyday disputes to ODR for quicker resolution.”

By deploying ODR for appropriate case types (consumer disputes, contract defaults, small-ticket claims, etc.), enterprises and legal systems can significantly reduce pressure on courts,  while delivering faster, more predictable outcomes.

3. Why Disputes Are Getting Tougher in the Age of Cyber and Digital Risk

What global corporate data shows

• The 2025 Global Disputes Forecast by Baker McKenzie highlights that cybersecurity and data privacy topped the list of business-dispute risks (45%), AI-related issues (44%), and employment disputes (32%) followed.
  
• 85% of in-house counsel surveyed expected their dispute-management budget to grow or remain stable, signalling readiness to invest in better systems to handle complex, technology-related disputes.

What this meant in 2025

Traditional dispute workflows, which are often manual, paper-based, and siloed, struggle to handle new-age disputes involving data breaches, AI-driven contract disputes, digital-asset issues, or multi-jurisdictional obligations. In addition, a lack of structured audit trails, poor data governance, and outdated workflows made many organisations vulnerable.

Why the DPDP Act Made These Challenges Even Harder

The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, which shaped compliance expectations throughout 2024–25, added a sharper layer of pressure. Workflows already strained by digital complexity now had to meet far stricter privacy and governance obligations.

The DPDP Act requires:

• Purpose-based processing only:  Dispute data must be used strictly for its intended purpose, which manual processes often cannot enforce.
• Clear consent and lawful-processing trails: Every piece of personal data used in a dispute needs an auditable record.
• Data minimisation: Only essential information may be collected; paper-heavy processes tend to over-collect by default.
• Secure, access-controlled storage: Physical files, emails, and shared drives fall short of the Act’s expectations for encryption and controlled access.
  
• Rights management: Data Principals can request correction, erasure (deletion of personal data when it is no longer needed or upon the user’s request) or grievance redressal, but unstructured workflows make tracking these requests nearly impossible.
• Breach reporting and accountability: Any unauthorised access or leak within the dispute pipeline triggers reporting obligations, making weak governance a direct compliance risk.

By 2025, a serious gap had emerged! Traditional dispute workflows were never built on privacy-by-design principles. They eventually lacked automated audit trails, policy-driven access controls, centralised evidence management, and structured retention or deletion rules.

“All in all, organisations became vulnerable; not only to cyber and digital-era disputes, but also to regulatory non-compliance under the DPDP Act itself.”

What Needs to Change in 2026

“Adopt ODR Platforms with built-In compliance, data Governance & workflow controls.”

The dispute-resolution system for 2026 must be tech-native: capable of handling digital evidence, maintaining proper audit trails, enforcing privacy compliance, automating notifications, and delivering complete traceability. This reduces legal and reputational risk and prepares organisations for the next wave of digital-age disputes.

4. Customer & Stakeholder Expectations Have Shifted

“Digital First is the New Norm”

What recent CX/Customer-Service data from India shows

• According to 2025 data from ServiceNow, 80% of Indian customers rely on AI chatbots or automated tools to check the status of issues/complaints or access self-help, reflecting a strong shift toward digital-first support expectations
  
• The same report highlights the risk of slowdown: customers are increasingly intolerant of delays. Slow resolution, especially when time-to-resolution is seen as long, leads many to abandon brands or shift loyalties. 

What 2025 revealed

For sectors like BFSI, e-commerce, and insurance, where dispute resolution is part of customer service, traditional methods that took days or weeks became bottlenecks. The disconnect between digital-first customer expectations and analog dispute workflows led to dissatisfaction, attrition, and brand risk.

What Needs to Change in 2026

“Build Customer-Centric ODR Workflows: Fast, Transparent, Digital”

Enterprises must treat dispute resolution like customer service: digital intake, real-time tracking, automated updates, remote hearings, so that customers feel heard, supported, and get a resolution quickly.

5. Economic & Social Cost of Delayed or Inefficient Dispute Resolution

What public policy research shows 

• The NITI Aayog ODR report emphasises cost savings and convenience as core benefits of ODR compared to traditional litigation, since ODR eliminates travel costs, reduces the need for physical infrastructure, and cuts lawyer/administrative expenses.
  
• With court pendency so high (as noted above), the economic burden for litigants, businesses, and the justice system, becomes unsustainable. Additionally, delayed resolution imposes productivity loss, operational inefficiency, and legal uncertainty. 

What this meant in 2025

Businesses and individuals incurred higher indirect costs: delayed contract enforcement, stalled recoveries, prolonged disputes, cash-flow risks, and weakened trust. Many potential resolutions simply dropped off because the friction and cost outweighed the benefits.

What Needs to Change in 2026

“ Use ODR to Lower the Hidden Costs of Disputes,  For All Stakeholders”

By moving dispute resolution online and streamlining the process end-to-end, enterprises can save direct costs (travel, lawyer fees, admin) and indirect costs (time delays, operational risk, business disruption, goodwill damage).

How a Platform Like Jupitice ODR Helps Bridge These Gaps

Implementing a mature, comprehensive ODR system, rather than patchwork or partial digital tools, helps enterprises build:

• Complete digital workflows (from intake to award) with audit-proof, compliant records.
  
• Remote hearings, asynchronous communication & scheduling, eliminating physical-attendance delays.
  
• Data governance, evidence handling, and privacy controls are critical for tech-related disputes.
  
• Customer-centric dispute handling, with transparency, speed, and lower friction.
  
• Scalability enables firms to manage higher volumes without a linear increase in resources.
  

A platform approach ensures that, in 2026, you are not just “digitising parts of dispute management,” but deploying a holistic justice-tech backbone, thereby avoiding the gaps that 2025 exposed.

What We Still Need to Watch Out For

Even with ODR, success is not automatic. It depends on:

• Digital access and readiness: Internet availability, devices, and digital literacy continue to vary across India.
  
• Data security and privacy discipline: Especially for sensitive disputes involving financial information, health data, or personally identifiable information (PII).
  
• Stakeholder adoption: Legal teams, customers, and regulators need awareness and confidence in the new system.

Hence, moving to ODR must be done with proper governance, training and readiness, not as a “digital cosmetic”.

Take Away

“2026 Will Reward the Prepared, Not the Partial Innovators”

2025 exposed how fragile manual, fragmented, reactive dispute-resolution systems really are. With an escalating backlog, rising dispute complexity, and shifting customer expectations, business-as-usual is unsustainable.

If you want to stay ahead, reduce risk and cost, and deliver fast, fair, transparent resolutions, invest in a full-fledged ODR platform, not a patchwork of disconnected tools. And, that’s how 2026-ready dispute systems will win! 

To build a truly future-ready dispute system, explore Jupitice ODR, the only complete, workflow-driven, secure Online Dispute Resolution platform designed to streamline the entire lifecycle from intake to closure.

Visit Jupiticeodr.com to see how a secure, ISO-certified and DPDP-compliant ODR platform, powered by blockchain records, structured workflows, and globally accredited neutrals, can streamline your disputes and future-proof your organisation.