Since both parties were members of the Greater Nashville Association of REALTORS ® («Association»), the dispute
went to an arbitration hearing conducted by the Association.
The reasoning was that since
arbitration is a form of alternative dispute resolution and not a true judicial
hearing, it did not violate the core principle of the collaborative process that attorneys were disqualified from
going to «court.»
While this might be beneficial, at least in the sense that the non-prevailing party might understand, if not appreciate, the basis on which the award was based, there has been an on -
going concern that, given the task of comprehensively and accurately articulating all of the acts and factors that are taken into account by an
arbitration panel in rendering its award, there might be an understandable (and possibly unavoidable) tendency
to oversimplify or generalize the basis on which an award was made, with the resulting explanation or rationale or «findings», whether written or oral, being relied on by the non-prevailing party (and likely by others) as «precedent»
to be introduced and relied on at future
arbitration hearings.