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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised I haven't yet heard of companies who would handle this for you, like there are e.g. for handling the process of getting compensation when an airline screws up scheduling or loses baggage, etc. I'm guessing there isn't enough money to be won there for them to be able to survive off a percentage of it.

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A hypothetical company that can do this, would also be capable of handling much more lucrative class action suits.

But they also have competition in the class action suit space but less so in the small claims case.

In some jurisdictions you have to show up to small claims yourself though which prevents some third party from just handling it. Makes sense since the idea behind small claims is to keep the legal costs low enough that you actually have a chance of recovering smaller sums without paying more then what you will get.

That's actually a great idea! Something like the companies that take care of getting refunds for flight tickets when the flight is delayed too long (in Germany you are legally entitled to a refund, but the process is long, so there are companies that do it for you and take a piece). They might have some common claims that they can add to a catalog. You could cut costs by re-using paperwork on these. As long as they could claim legal fees, which I'm not sure of.

I used such a company for airline compensation once. Took them 2 years to drag the process around and at the end I got nothing.

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