INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Years ago, Teel Lidow arrived at the airport to take a standard, eight-hour flight from Santiago, Chile to New York City
The journey ended up taking three days, involved an emergency landing, and passengers entering two countries (Ecuador and Peru) they never
planned to enter.When they finally arrived in New York, the airline handed out a piece of paper that offered passengers $300 in exchange for
The startup looks to simplify and automate the process of going through individual arbitration with big companies in just these types of
Lidow, a lawyer, went through the process on his own and ended up getting an apology from the airline, $2,000 in cash and $1,600 in flight
vouchers.FairShake uses machine learning to automate that process
Lidow equates FairShake to Turbo Tax
looking to bring the same ease of use to filing individual arbitration, letting the user input the relevant information and then spitting
out the appropriate documentation and coaching to guide the user through the entire process.The impetus for FairShake is, in part, based on
changes to the legal system
In 2011, the Supreme Court made a ruling in AT-T Mobility LLC v
Concepcion that companies are allowed to enforce mandatory arbitration in their TOS or service contracts.Translated: When you sign up to use
a service or buy a product, the contract you sign most likely has an arbitration clause
arbitration.Before this ruling, class action settlements covered 350 million Americans over a five-year period
arbitration, and those who do may find it cumbersome and tedious.FairShake is looking to help automate a good deal of that process and coach
customers through the process, which would otherwise take about 10 hours of research and document gathering and creation.The company charges
20 percent of any cash or credits the consumer wins in arbitration from the company, and 10 percent of any amount deducted from what the
consumer owes the company
