Durham-based startup Courtroom5 began like many companies do – with frustration.
Sonja Ebron was frustrated, finding herself in court, again, without a lawyer. She compares it to being “beat up” – trying to wade through a system so complex that Ebron, an accomplished electrical engineer with a doctorate degree, found it nearly impossible.
“I didn’t feel I had been treated fairly by the court, by the whole process,” she said.
While she “managed to figure it out” in the end, she couldn’t help thinking about others in her position who didn’t have the same educational advantages. That line of thinking had her cofounding Courtroom5 with fellow former college professor Debra Slone. The goal? To make justice accessible.
Since Courtroom5 went live in April 2017 thousands of people have been served by the online legal aid resource, which provides educational information and technical documents that enable individuals to represent themselves in court.
“In societies where access to justice doesn’t exist, you really ultimately have a problem with your democracy,” Ebron said.
Ebron has been involved in a lot of litigation on both sides – from traffic tickets to evictions to debt collection. A roofing contractor dumped nails in her driveway from fixing the house next door. A mechanic damaged her vehicle on an auto repair job. And the list goes on.
You figure out quickly that you’re “not in Judge Judy’s court," she said.
You have to file the case, file responsive documents, prepare for a trial, even an appeal. You see a judge a dozen times, maybe more. And you file hundreds of legal documents “just to get a fair understanding of the facts,” she said.
“At each step you have to figure out, where am I? What matters now,” Ebron said.
And it is expensive, with the average cost of lawyers in the U.S at about $300 an hour. A typical case has a lawyer spending 200 hours or more representing you.
But by educating yourself through Courtroom5, you can reduce those billable hours – or even eliminate them, depending on the case, Ebron said. She estimates the average person, aided by Courtroom5, can do upwards of 80 percent of the work a lawyer can do.
“What we’ve learned is the technology and process – the patent pending process we’ve developed – can effectively help people do the vast majority of that work,” she said. And that’s a big deal, particularly to people of color, who “tend to not be treated fairly by some of our other citizens,” Ebron said.
“We tend to find ourselves in court more often than other people,” she said.
Courtroom5 is Ebron’s third entrepreneurial endeavor. Previously, much of her work surrounded electric utilities. A former employee of what is now Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), Ebron has worked to create artificial intelligence applications for power grids and even founded a solar power startup. She admits Courtroom5 is a big deviation. But says it’s vital, particularly today when there is a renewed focus on inequality in the nation's justice system.
Right now, Courtroom5 is a subscription service, but Ebron said it’s experimenting with different pricing models. The firm has six employees – three full-timers. And it has the support of Techstars and the North Carolina Idea Foundation.
The goal in the next several months is to launch the service to a nationwide market across 20 different claim types, and bring lawyers onto the platform, Ebron said.