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The market for legal services is an extreme power law. I used to run an online arbitration service where I paid arbitrators a fixed $150 for handling a case and
by peterjancelis 11y ago
The market for legal services is an extreme power law. I used to run an online arbitration service where I paid arbitrators a fixed $150 for handling a case and was amazed at the caliber of people that applied.
Former law firm partners, Harvard Law grads who worked on Capitol Hill before, legal scholars with published books, all of it.
Turns out a tiny number of arbitrators can charge hundreds of dollars per hour for high value arbitration cases, while the rest just begs for scraps.
- woah 11y agoWhat happened to the service?
- peterjancelis 11y agoArbitration requires either an arbitration clause upfront or a mutual post-dispute agreement to arbitrate. The latter rarely never happens as cases are often quite clear or parties don't talk anymore, the former is rare for small claims where my $300 arbitration made sense. So it turned out I was begging for scraps too. The only way similar services survive is by partnering with marketplaces and handling all their disputes. This leads to kangaroo courts cause the arbitration firm ends up having just a few large clients (the marketplaces) despite having hundreds or thousands of cases (the marketplace users).