ADR Group of the Year Award 2024

The Chief Judge is pleased to announce that the Land and Environment Court of NSW has been awarded “Courts and Tribunals – ADR Group of the Year” at the prestigious Australian Disputes Centre ADR Awards 2024.

The Australian Disputes Centre was first established in 1986 by the then NSW Attorney General, the Honourable Justice Terry Sheahan and the Honourable Sir Laurence Street, Chief Justice of the NSW Supreme Court,  and is now dedicated to advancing alternative dispute resolution across Australia and internationally to deliver benefits of world class alternative dispute resolution to businesses, professionals, governments and communities.

This award from the Australian Disputes Centre recognises the wide range of reforms that have been undertaken by the Court so as to be able to provide a range of dispute resolution processes to parties which it matches to the individual dispute and disputants.

Appropriate dispute resolution procedures have now been embedded in the Court’s practices, processes and procedures and this has resulted in a shift in legal culture from being highly litigious and adversarial to conciliatory and consensual.

The outstanding success of the Land and Environment Court’s ADR processes, the value it provides to the community and the benefits to the parties of providing individualised justice are demonstrated by the year on year increase in the number of matters that continue to be filed in the Court and number of matter that are conciliated and resolved without the necessity for adjudication.

This is the Court's third Australian Disputes Centre ADR Award, with the first award being "Courts and Tribunals - ADR Group of the Year 2018" and "ADR Innovation of the Year 2020".