All they need to do is get a few Cravath people and Stanford Law School profs and grads on their about page. Then it's "judge.me, built by alumni of Cravath and Stanford Law School. A Silicon Valley approach to reducing out of control legal costs."
Another alternative would be to work with an up and coming Valley law firm ultimately gunning for WSGR's business, but willing to start by automating arbitration.
This reputation transfer trick is the key way to bootstrap a new enterprise that needs to establish itself. Get a few of the most farsighted members of the old guard to invest, endorse, join, publicize. That is why Coursera and Udacity are so much more likely to succed than the University of Phoenix: because they have Stanford faculty who defected. All they need are a few defectors.
My arbitrators include well known and very experienced libertarian legal scholars - I list some of them below in this thread. Obviously I would welcome Stanford Law faculty to apply as well.
Looks really interesting. Can you tell me how lawyers are reacting to the pricing you are paying them for being arbitrators? (assuming you are paying them) and if you are not paying them, how are you getting them to agree.
When I look at $300 for a case, I think, well, most attorneys bill at $400+ an hour (many for as much as $1,000), and they may get $100/hour+ personally after splitting with the law firm, so if a case takes more than 3 hours to arbitrate it seems hard.
On the other hand, there are no law jobs out there, so maybe you are getting fresh graduates?
You get what you pay for. I think you identified it. You are going to get a decision made after a cursory review of the submitted evidence, i.e. a "gut reaction." Might be little better than a coin flip in some cases.
Then the ruling can be attacked as capricious and arbitrary, thereby negating any value to the judgement in the first place. Curious how they are going to deal with that.
Another alternative would be to work with an up and coming Valley law firm ultimately gunning for WSGR's business, but willing to start by automating arbitration.
This reputation transfer trick is the key way to bootstrap a new enterprise that needs to establish itself. Get a few of the most farsighted members of the old guard to invest, endorse, join, publicize. That is why Coursera and Udacity are so much more likely to succed than the University of Phoenix: because they have Stanford faculty who defected. All they need are a few defectors.