Shane Mulrooney – New Era ADR

Shane Mulrooney never planned to launch his own alternative dispute resolution (ADR) company. But if you look at his career, how he co-founded New Era ADR almost feels inevitable. The stars aligned—just like they always seem to for Mulrooney—and today, he is not only a co-founder but also the company’s general counsel and head of customer success, wearing multiple hats in an organization redefining how disputes are resolved.

Shane Mulrooney | New Era ADR | Co-Founder & General Counsel & Head of Customer Success

New Era is not your typical legal services provider. The company was founded on the belief that resolving disputes should be more efficient, accessible, and cost-effective. Unlike litigation and traditional arbitration, which can drag on for years and rack up exorbitant legal fees, New Era streamlines the process using technology, its unique rules, and flat fees. This allows disputes to be resolved faster, more affordably, and in a way that prioritizes fairness for all parties.

“I wasn’t thinking about founding my own ADR firm,” Mulrooney admits. “But I kept running into the same frustrations over and over. The way disputes were handled was inefficient, expensive, and unnecessarily painful. When I talked with my co-founders, who had the same experience, we had the opportunity to do something about it, and I couldn’t say no.”

The road to today

Mulrooney’s career path was not a straight line to legal technology and ADR. After earning a communications degree from Truman State University and a JD from the University of Illinois College of Law, he spent nearly five years in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis, specializing in tax and corporate mergers and acquisitions. From there, he moved in-house to Home Chef, where he served as Vice President of Legal. During this time, he had his first real exposure to litigation.

“I quickly became frustrated with the available options for resolving disputes—either go to court and spend years fighting or use arbitration, which often felt just as slow and costly,” he says. “I was shocked at how outdated the process was.”

In 2018, Mulrooney helped lead Home Chef through an acquisition by Kroger, and a year later, he left the company. He took time off, traveled the world, and eventually moved to Ann Arbor while his (now) wife pursued her MBA at Michigan. Around that time, his friend and New Era co-founder, Collin Williams, reached out. Williams, a former litigator and General Counsel himself, had much experience with drawn-out legal battles and had been thinking about starting an ADR company for years. He knew Mulrooney felt similarly; it was the perfect time to bring him on board.

“Collin had been cooking up this idea for a while. He knew the pain points inside and out, and he knew I shared his frustrations with the current legal system. He called me up and said, ‘We’ve talked about this before—let’s do it,’” Mulrooney recalls.

So, along with two other co-founders—one another General Counsel and the other a legal operations and compliance professional—they began building New Era in June 2020, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A virtual-first revolution

The timing was perfect. The pandemic accelerated the adoption of virtual solutions in every industry, including legal services. While some in the legal world initially resisted handling disputes remotely, the shift to digital was happening whether they liked it or not.

“We thought we’d face a lot of resistance to the virtual model, but because of the pandemic, everyone was already adapting to remote work. That worked in our favor,” says Mulrooney. “Now, most people accept that many disputes can be handled virtually.”

New Era’s platform is entirely cloud-based and designed to make the dispute resolution process seamless. Everything happens in a centralized location, from intake to final decision—eliminating the inefficiencies of endless email threads and document exchanges.

“The legal industry is one of the last to embrace innovation. What we’re doing is long overdue,” Mulrooney says. “Our system integrates video conferencing, document submission, case tracking and decision issuance all in one place, seamlessly connecting the parties to a dispute and their counsel with experienced arbitrators and mediators. When the case is done, you click a button and download everything. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it works.”

It’s catching the attention of leading businesses and major organizations, which want to focus on the core issues of their disputes instead of procedural gamesmanship. New Era customers include high-profile sports teams, national sports organizations and major companies in entertainment, retail, technology, real estate, automotive, financial services, and beyond. Their early and significant success is why ALM and Law.com named New Era “New Law Company of the Year” at their 2024 Legalweek conference.

Leading with customer experience

Beyond his role as General Counsel, Mulrooney also leads the company’s customer success efforts. He is deeply involved in refining New Era’s rules and procedures, ensuring the platform remains fair, adaptable, and valuable for users on both sides of a dispute. One of his recent projects was overhauling the company’s rules section on its website, making it more comprehensive and user-friendly.

“We’re always tweaking things to improve the experience,” he explains. “We listen to formal and informal feedback from users, customers and Neutrals. That input helps us optimize the process. We release updates to our rules a few times a year, though as we refine things, those updates become less frequent.”

New Era also introduced a tiered fee structure to accommodate different user needs and make dispute resolution more accessible.

“We want to make sure our processes are fair and balanced. That’s non-negotiable. But we also need to ensure that we’re growing in a way that aligns with our mission,” Mulrooney says. “It’s about striking the right balance—scaling smartly without compromising what makes us different.”

The future of ADR

New Era now has 12 full-time employees and nearly 100 independent arbitrators and mediators working with the platform. The company is headquartered in Chicago, but its team is spread across the country, including New York, Colorado, Tennessee and Minnesota. Mulrooney himself now lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, having left Chicago for a quieter lifestyle. Despite its geographical spread, the company remains connected through technology.

“We’re fully remote, and we practice what we preach. Our arbitrations and mediations happen virtually, so it makes sense that our team operates that way, too. We use Slack, Zoom, Google Calendar, and other tools to stay connected and maintain that in-person feel,” he says. “And we’re always looking for talented engineers, legal professionals, and anyone else highly motivated to deliver on our mission of bringing fair, efficient dispute resolution to the US legal industry.”

Looking ahead, New Era is focused on refining its platform, expanding its reach, and proving that its model can work across various industries and dispute types. While the company has primarily grown through its network, it’s now investing in sales and marketing efforts to bring more cases to the platform.

“We know our platform works for many different kinds of disputes. The challenge is figuring out how to market that effectively. Right now, we’re targeting specific industries while remaining flexible. We don’t want to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks—we’re intentional about our growth,” Mulrooney says.

For a man who never set out to start his own company, Mulrooney has found himself at the center of a movement changing how disputes are resolved. And, as has always been the case in his career, everything is working out just as it should.