You may be thinking of small claims courts, where some states don't allow lawyers. Arbitration follows whatever rules the arbitration organization chooses.
The article only mentions it once, but this is "binding arbitration." "Binding" as in both parties are bound by the decision and neither has any further recourse.
You can't understand the IMAP spec until you have been personally berated by Mark Crispin. Unfortunately, Mark has passed away, so the number of people who understand the spec is only going to decrease.
It may seem that a client implementation is vastly easier, but that is an illusion. Some of the complexity arises from the way IMAP imposes no specific naming model for mailboxes, so the client has to be prepared for that. But most of the complexity comes from dealing with offline operation and attendant state synchronization in a way that isn't horrendously inefficient.
If "Successful incorporation of remote work boils down to a few things that sound simple but are difficult in practice," and "difficult" actually means "impossible," then this writer's argument is … what, exactly?