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Comment by avolcano | Hacker News Reader

"Wevorce is already having success. While living in Idaho, Michelle ran a beta test. She put 104 families through the system and only one went to court."

This was the part that was most surprising to me. That's an incredibly good success rate (albiet with a small test) for something that's trying to mediate such a polarized situation. All it takes is either party not being satisfied with what they got to push it to court, so it must be extremely good at helping both sides feel comfortable with the outcome.

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Careful: there's also a self-selection effect here. Only those couples who have a fairly good chance at a somewhat amicable separation would even try a service like this. Wevorce would probably have a much lower success rate with 104 randomly selected families going through divorce.

True, but that is still 'success'; a service like this would seem to be aimed only at relatively amicable divorces.

Nobody thinking "I'm gonna take the conniving, lying, cheating-ass bitch/bastard for everything she/he is worth!" would be trying to use this.

For a scientific study you are absolutely correct, however, this is a business and in business you only deal with the self-selecting group that would use your service. The better question would be what percentage of the market would actually use this service, especially knowing that it has and over 99% success rate. In my experience women often want a fast divorce and men want a cheap one so if she can provide that she has a winning business proposition.

I think asking whether wevorce provides any benefit to its customers is also a pretty good question. This is why the self-selection problem is important. 99% of wevorce users don't go to court, but is that an improvement over the baseline percentage for the kinds of couples that would use wevorce?

Thanks for the question (I'm with Wevorce). I think you're right, that self-selection does contribute to our very high success rate. But the fact is, we definitely see our share of contentious situations and are able to help them too. Since we know that even some of the folks who want an amicable divorce at the beginning are turned hostile by the grind of the traditional system, we don't see self-selection as "a problem." We're happy for amicable divorces anyway they come.

The benefit to our customers goes well beyond signing the papers. There's a strong education and co-parenting/budgeting tool component which, clients tell us, brings way more value than the legal aspect of ending a marriage.

Another point: Wevorce not only has to convince both parties that an amicable divorce is best, but they have to overcome possible influence from friends/family/lovers as well. This is quite an accomplishment.

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