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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

"the law provides well-established enforcement mechanisms by which arbitration awards can, if necessary, be taken to court and converted into judgments without too much fuss."

What I heard from another entrepreneur in this space (there are several competitors) is that small claims court is effectively not legally binding in most jurisdictions, because very few judges are going to issue a bench warrant or seize your house even if you blatantly don't pay the judgment against you. So even if there is a contract here, it doesn't seem like this would be any different unless there is enough money at stake that it's ultimately no longer under the small claims umbrella if the contract gets violated.

/Not a lawyer

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You don't need to arrest someone or seize property. You can just put a lien on it, which is a recorded document that you are legally entitled to be paid first if the person sells their house property, or you can garnish the person's wages or bank account.

If you win a small claims judgement, you have options to pursue collect yourself, like having a lien placed on their house, or having wages garnished. You're right in that it's not like the court will proactively help you collect, but there are tools at your disposal so that a judgement is valuable.

If people on the losing side of a small claims decision are willing to ignore it, why would they be any more likely to abide by the result of a judge.me decision?

(edit: re-reading what you wrote, I think that is your point)

If arbitration is with a contract, the winning side might have a stronger case in a real court.

Couple ideas:

Judge.me should have a public list of shamed people who haven't paid their bills. If it gets big enough this might be relevant, people might look at judge.me to see if a person they do business with is reputable. Or maybe it could somehow be reported to the credit bureaus.

Another one is if Judge.me holds the potential payments in escrow before the judgement takes place.

User profiles are indeed the long term goal. This would result in a pure private law instead of the hybrid model we have now where we still need government courts for enforcement.

Just so you know - your 'How it works' page contains a large number of phrases that you presumably intended to mark [as links] bu which aren't links. Looks a bit odd.

Yes, I still have to write the [content pages] for those.

Judge.me should have a public list of shamed people who haven't paid their bills

Would sort of work against their marketing claim that arbitration activity on their service is private.

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