Rebooting Justice

I've had several disputes / legal issues come up in the ordinary course of business, mainly through ineptitude / incompetence of the other party rather than actual malice, but unfortunately it is indeed rather impractical to use the legal system for practical resolution of problems since lawyers are too expensive, and small claims court / pro se litigation is too time consuming.

Big companies, landlords, employers and the like know this, and often totally ignore disputes/problems faced by consumers, even if they'd obviously lose if it ever went to a court.

I think it would be interesting to try some alternative funding mechanisms for legal services - something like a co-operative with attorneys on staff where you can refer issues, and members vote on which ones to pursue? Or a lottery system? Or have any damages awarded go back to the co-operative to fund new cases?

The general idea would be to find a practical way to fund even a small subset of cases to set precedents and have large corporates, landlords, employers behave better towards members of the co-operative.

Summary: Switch from the current adversarial method (you are expected to find any and all arguments in your favor), to an inquisitorial system (where the judge attempts to find out the details of the case by asking questions and bringing up things you may not have thought of).

The inquisitorial system is already used in small claims court.

The only drawbacks mentioned in the article is a greater potential for Judicial misconduct.

It seems like a pretty obvious thing to do (perhaps make it optional). Are there drawbacks I've missed?

Many people view basic healthcare as a human right. I think in a modern democratic society with rule by law, basic legal representation should be a basic human right as well. One of the biggest source of inequality in justice is the access to lawyers.

I think the solution is somewhat similar to the universal health care systems many countries have. The government will pay a certain billable rate to the lawyer a person goes to. Every lawyer as a condition of their license to practice law is required to accept these clients.

If we do this, this will eliminate a lot of the inequality that comes from rich people having access to better lawyers.

My SO and I were just talking about this:

> Today most people simply can’t afford to use the courts to sue, and if accused of a crime they must mostly settle as if guilty, even if they are innocent, all because the system is now crazy expensive. (It didn’t use to be.) Inquisitorial judges would change that, and give most people meaningful access to a legal system to defend themselves.

I had been thinking about this exact problem, to apply all the benefits of GitHub to the law profession, and to build Agreement.app

I bought the domain name, and recently reserved the app name in the app stores. But most importantly, I run a tech company which already built the technology, that lets us produce and launch an app like this within a few weeks.

This being Hacker Hews, I thought I'd try something cool, to bring capital and technology together right on the site. I welcome anyone here to contact me about partnering on it, especially if you work in a law firm. We would start a new company, jointly owned. Qbix would contribute the base technology to build it, launch it, as well as the entire initial user base once it’s launched. But we need to cover the cost of developing and iterating the app.

Here is the full proposal and business plan: https://qbix.com/links/agreement

If you're interested, simply email me at greg at the domain qbix.com and we can set up a Zoom call where I demo to you what we have at the moment.