The Alternative to Letting It Go
TL;DR
- Petty Court is a first stop for the small, stubborn disputes that don’t get to court and have nowhere else to go.
- It doesn’t pass verdicts, it facilitates. We help both parties reach their own agreement.
- What you walk away with is a signed agreement, which is a contract, potentially binding, provided it fulfills the requirements of a valid contract.
- Bigger or unsafe matters get triaged out and routed to a human lawyer or mediator instead of festering with nowhere to go.
- It’s an experiment. We’re excited about where it goes and are honest that we don’t yet know exactly what that looks like.
- The two challenges we’re naming up front: we’re working on improving the mechanism to get second parties to show up in good faith, and ensuring the platform catches disputes that may hide coercion or abuse.
- We are not here to replace the courts, the lawyers, or the elder settling a quarrel. We are rebuilding a tier of dispute resolution fit for how we live now.
- The only way it gets better is with you in it. That dispute you already let go of? Bring it here. Try it, and share feedback: product@pettycourt.com.
- The year’s mission: reliably resolve or escalate twenty thousand disputes.
Imagine all the times when you had a dispute with someone (a flatmate, a friend, a vendor, an acquaintance) and you had to let it go, or at best rant on your WhatsApp group about it, and they couldn’t do anything about it, same as you.
Ideally, in every context, dispute resolution should have a shape that everyone involved understands. At the family level, between friends, even with that Instagram vendor. Almost all the time, the thing a person with a grievance wants, right after resolution itself, is somewhere to take it.
Today we have formal courts, and beneath them a scattering of dispute resolution mechanisms, many of them informal or very niche. Many of them, inaccessible, ineffective, or just plainly not understood. And yet, the courts are overwhelmed, unable to handle effectively and on time even those disputes that deserve their attention, while interpersonal tensions rise in a fast-evolving economic and social world with no recognized outlet for aggrieved parties.
At the same time, digital technology has taken over much of our lives, and LLMs have arrived to tighten a hold that already felt like a chokehold. We hold no illusions about that, because that same hold is also what makes a solution like Petty Court possible.
What Petty Court is
Petty Court is an AI-powered solution for the disputes that aren’t worth a lawyer’s hour or a formal court’s time: typically, the small, stubborn disagreements that have nowhere to go. We help parties arrive at an AI-assisted resolution.
At this point, it’s important to point out that it is an experiment, and while we are excited about the limitless possibilities of where this could go, we simply do not know where it ends up.
Another honest point worth making right off the bat is that we cannot enforce our resolutions, and participation is voluntary on both sides. The word ‘Court’ in the name promises an authority we do not have. An AI has no such standing. To be clear, Petty Court leans toward facilitation, helping the parties reach their own agreement, and away from anything that looks like a machine handing down a verdict. The name is to be read loosely. Don’t think of it as a court with the force of law; think of ‘Court’ as a venue for dispute resolution broadly.
Why it holds
However, there are more than enough ‘small’ disputes out there where both parties want a way out, and we hope those are the people who leverage this the most.
When they do, the result is an agreement that both parties can sign, and that is the part that matters. A signed agreement is a contract, provided it fulfils all the terms of a valid contract, with terms both sides chose and that a court will recognize. So the resolution moves from merely voluntary to something the law can hold them to.
Some will say an LLM isn’t a “mediator,” so a settlement it produced shouldn’t carry weight. But we are not claiming to mediate in any formal sense, and we do not need to. What the parties walk away with is a contract between them, and a contract binds because of what it is and who signed it.
Where we are vs Where we’re headed
We also know that “petty” and “unqualified for a formal court” are legal judgments many Nigerians cannot make for themselves. So Petty Court is built in anticipation of the cases that turn out to be bigger than they seemed. When a matter exceeds what we can responsibly handle, users are guided to escalate to a lawyer or a professional human mediator.
We want to be clear about where we are today and where we are headed, because the two are not the same. We have launched without the full escalation module. For now, when a matter is escalated, a professional is assigned the case by hand and prompted to follow up with the party who raised it. The built-out version, which is coming, will automate this end-to-end: parties will choose from a list of legal professionals, and those professionals will list and manage their own profiles and their dealings on the platform, should they choose to.
The hard parts
There are challenges we are currently thinking through, researching, and working on, and we’d want to name them rather than pretend they don’t exist.
The first is getting the second party to show up. One aggrieved person signs up without much prompting. Persuading the other to join, engage in good faith, and honour the outcome is a huge challenge, and we’ve put mechanisms in place to improve the chances. We are also treating this as a core piece of the product that we continue to improve upon.
The second is safety. A “petty” dispute can hide coercion, abuse, or one party using us to harass another. Our triage has to catch matters that are unsafe to touch. Someone harassing another, disagreements over the proceeds of crime, etc. We have mechanisms in place and will continue to improve safeguards around this.
Where this goes
The vision survives all of these challenges. We want Petty Court to be the natural starting point for small disputes of every kind, a place where most of them are settled satisfactorily, as our capabilities grow alongside the models themselves. To be clear and for emphasis: we are not trying to replace the courts, the lawyers, or the wisdom of an elder settling a quarrel. We are trying to rebuild, in a form fit for how we live now, a tier of dispute resolution that can catch things before they grow too large or cost too much. And when something is already too large for us, we make sure it reaches the legal system rather than festering with nowhere to go.
Again, this is an experiment, and the only way it gets better is with you in it. That dispute you were going to let go of? Bring it here. Try it, then tell us what works and what doesn’t at product@pettycourt.com.
Our mission for the year ahead is simple to state and hard to earn: to reliably resolve or escalate twenty thousand disputes.
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