“Why would I trust your arbiter?” is the right question to ask. You’re being invited to let one person investigate your dispute and, if you choose the binding option, decide it. Skepticism is appropriate.
So let me answer it the way a skeptic would want: not with adjectives, but with the mechanism. Trust here isn’t a favor we ask for. It’s a product of how the neutral is chosen, how they’re paid, and what they’re allowed to do.
You choose them — both of you
In court, you don’t pick your judge. You’re assigned one, and that judge is carrying hundreds of other cases.
In our process, nobody is assigned. We recruit and vet neutral arbiters and mediators, then propose candidates to the parties — and both sides must agree on the one who serves. Each side can say no. That mutual veto matters more than any credential: the person running your dispute starts with the confidence of both parties, because both parties put them there.
A neutral who depends on being acceptable to both sides, dispute after dispute, has no future in favoring either one.
Who the neutrals are
The people we propose are experienced professionals — mediators, arbitrators, and lawyers who have spent their careers around exactly these kinds of disputes. We vet them before proposing them, and we match the candidate to the subject matter, because a construction dispute and a software dispute need different expertise.
I’ll be direct about what we don’t claim: no roster of humans is infallible, ours included. What we can say is that every neutral is vetted by us, accepted by both parties, and works inside the safeguards described below.
The incentives point the right way
This is the part I care most about, after forty years of watching incentives shape behavior.
An hourly litigation system rewards duration. Every additional motion, deposition, and dispute over documents is billable. Nobody has to act in bad faith for the process to slow down; the economics do it quietly.
Our neutrals work for a flat fee, agreed before the process starts. A longer case doesn’t pay them more. The only way for a neutral to succeed is to get to a fair answer efficiently — which is exactly what you want them to do.
And they work for the resolution, not for the party that hired them. We do not represent either side. That’s the structural difference between a neutral and an advocate.
What they’re allowed to do — and not do
The neutral drives the process. They ask for the documents and testimony they actually need, from both sides equally, and they look at the facts and the law. Lawyers may advise or speak for the parties, but they can’t demand discovery, cross-examine witnesses, or file motions without the neutral’s consent — the machinery that makes litigation adversarial simply isn’t available to either side.
A neutral is expected to disclose anything that could reasonably bear on their impartiality, such as a prior relationship with a party. If something surfaces that shouldn’t be there, the mutual-selection principle applies again: a neutral both sides can’t trust doesn’t serve.
Trust, verified
None of this asks you to take character on faith. You interview the candidate through their track record, you exercise your veto, you see the flat fee and the scope in writing before anything starts, and in the nonbinding option, nothing is enforceable unless you sign it.
That’s what trust looks like when it’s engineered rather than requested. The question isn’t whether our arbiters and mediators are trustworthy in the abstract. It’s whether the system would let an untrustworthy one succeed. We’ve tried hard to build one that wouldn’t.