Overview Of The First Five Months Of Invest4Justice: What Have We Learned?

It has been a busy five months since Invest4Justice fully opened to the public in November-December 2014, after 10 months of beta-testing under the domain name Lawtrade, which went online in February 2014. What have we learned?

First, we are pleased to see the tremendous amount of interest generated by litigation crowdfunding, which far exceeded our expectations. Invest4Justice was the first litigation crowdfunding website to exist, but it has already spawned competitors (none of which offer as transparent or inexpensive terms for crowdfunding a legal case, however, and none of which allow litigants the same amount of control over their litigation crowdfunding campaigns). We were pleased to see that three cases were fully funded. We were sad to see that others did not obtain the litigation funding that was being sought, although a few lessons have been learned. First of all, the more funding that is required, the longer it will take to obtain funding, which seems obvious but is worth stating so that litigants can determine the length of their litigation crowdfunding campaigns appropriately. The maximum length of a crowdfunding campaign is one year, and we intend to keep it this way. Second, the developed world appears to be more interested in litigation crowdfunding, perhaps because crowdfunding in general is more widely known there. Third, the litigation funding campaigns that were successful were shared quite a bit on social networks, which appears to have contributed to their success. There can be no doubt that active participants in crowdfunding will generate far more potential funding for their case, and we advise those seeking funding to play an active role with respect to their litigation funding campaign, sharing it with their communities to the greatest extent possible. Finally, the cases that have been the most successful either touched a nerve, since it was obvious that someone had been badly wronged, or they have offered a healthy reward to encourage funding. In order to obtain litigation crowdfunding success, our tips on how to succeed in crowdfunding a legal claim appear to remain accurate.

Second, we were disappointed to see that more lawyers had not become active members, since in addition to being a litigation crowdfunding website, Invest4Justice is designed to be a useful tool to connect litigants to lawyers, regardless of whether or not they are seeking funding. Perhaps we did not do as good as job stressing this aspect of the website, which is both a litigation crowdfunding network and a network design to take some of the friction out of lawyer-client pairings, much like an online dating website, but for lawyers and potential clients. From feedback, it seems that most lawyers were very interested in this aspect of the network, but did not realize that it existed, which is our fault. Others were afraid that using Invest4Justice would cost something or that they would receive unwanted newsletters. Neither of the latter fears are true, and we lawyers are a conservative bunch and very busy, but the rate of sign-ups has been increasing, so we have no doubt that it will continue now that lawyers see that becoming a member of Invest4Justice does not commit them to anything, costs nothing and merely helps them to connect with potential clients.

Third, we saw that contributors had a number of questions with respect to where the funds they contributed were being held and whether their funds would remain secure. Since Invest4Justice was brand new, we cannot blame them for being worried about this aspect of the network and who was handling the money that was held in escrow. We put on our thinking caps and came up with a technological solution to address this concern, which has increased the rates of contributions by over 500%: rather than holding contributors’ funds in escrow, as we did at the outset, we implemented a solution using Paypal Advanced Payments that allows contributors to pledge to fund a case, but not to contribute anything until 100% of the funding that is required is raised. When the full amount of funding is raised, contributors’ funds are then transferred directly to the litigant, without Invest4Justice ever touching the funds that contributors contribute. If the full amount of litigation funding is not raised, all pre-authorized contributions are also automatically cancelled. The only downside of this technical solution is that we had to limit total contributions per case to USD 6,000 per individual for pre-authorized pledges, although larger amounts can still be sent via wire transfer, and people who contribute will have to have a valid Paypal account if they would like to contribute using their credit card instead of a wire transfer, for technical reasons. This is a small price to pay to ensure that nothing is paid by contributors unless a case is fully-funded, however, or that funds are sent directly to litigants, and the amount of contributions has increased dramatically since we made this change.

Fourth, we had a number of complaints that our servers were too slow, and we wanted to increase the level of security on Invest4Justice to the highest levels. We therefore upgraded our server to make it many times more powerful, added encryption, and we increased security levels far higher than nearly any other website by adding three different layers of security. The truth is that Invest4Justice now offers a level of protection that is unseen in the legal industry, and far higher than the security used on nearly all websites. The only downside is that users may be forced to answer questions when accessing their accounts when accessing Invest4Justice via suspicious IP addresses, but we believe that the trade-off between the highest level of security and such controls is worth it, since our goal is to keep all of the information and documents submitted on Invest4Justice protected by security of the highest level. If you have any problems caused by the increased security measures, just e-mail us at contact@invest4justice.com, and we would be glad to help you with this.

In short, Invest4Justice is coming of age, and there is no doubt that litigation crowdfunding works and this platform was badly needed. There is no question that contributors can promote important legal rights via Invest4Justice, or that they can make a killing on contingency fees, so please spread the news that litigation funding is safe, inexpensive, and it makes paying for a lawsuit more affordable without incurring any loans or debt and can also allow very interesting investment opportunities.

Finally, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about using Invest4Justice, and we thank you for the support of our initiative to enable access to justice that does not depend on the amount of money available to spend on a legal case.

– William, Manu, Safiye and Taissi 

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