Two parties, two lawyers, dozens of attachments, calls and offers — and no shared system that knows what's agreed, what's disputed, and what would actually settle it. Kashtab is that system. It starts the day the demand letter lands and stays until the money moves.
No charge, no card, no account — and the person you invite never signs up either. We are trying to learn whether this works before we ever think about price.
Everyone who touches a dispute needs a different amount of privacy. Email gives everyone the same one — none. Kashtab separates them at the architecture level, not with a policy page.
The point: the clearing engine is told "the payer will go no higher than X" and "the payee will go no lower than Y" — it is never handed X or Y. Neither private zone can read the other. That is a data-access boundary, not a promise.
Most civil disputes end in a settlement. The expensive part isn't the settlement — it's everything both sides burn before anyone is willing to say a real number out loud.
Illustrative only. Timelines vary enormously by state, court and case type. Nothing here predicts how long any particular matter will take, and nothing here is a claim about what your matter is worth.
A money-only comparison returns no deal the moment the two numbers miss each other. But money is rarely the only thing in the room.
Why this matters: a spreadsheet compares one number to one number. When two sides are two thousand apart on cash but one can finish the work and the other can pay this week, that is a deal — and only a multi-variable check finds it.
Most tools promise this in a privacy policy. Here it is a property of where the data sits: your figure and theirs live in separate places, and the comparison runs between them rather than inside either browser.
What each of you gets back: a verdict — compatible on cash, compatible once the non-cash terms you both ticked are counted, or not yet. Never an amount. We checked this the obvious way: we tried to read one side's figure from the other side's session, and could not.
The people in a dispute and the lawyers who handle them need completely different products. So we built two.
Open a matter, paste a demand letter, then invite the other side. You get a link and a passphrase to send them; they open it with no account and see the record and what is on it — and nothing of your private lane. Enter a limit on each side and the comparison runs between you.
Your real floor, your worries. The other side never sees this, ever.
On the record. Typos flagged, hostile phrasing flagged before you send.
Paste a demand letter and it tells you what the text says — and which fields it does not contain.
Free, no account. A matter is saved with a code and a passphrase you choose — there is no login to forget.
Nothing. Not a trial — nothing.
No card, no account, no per-matter fee, no percentage of any settlement, and nothing charged to any lawyer.
Two reasons, and the second one matters more than the first.
One: we have no users yet. The only thing worth buying right now is evidence that this actually ends disputes, and a price tag buys us nothing except a smaller sample.
Two: in the United States, the arrangements that regulators have shut down in this space were shut down over money flows — how a fee was split, what a payment was actually for — not over the software. The largest attempt at fixed-price legal services on a platform was withdrawn after regulatory objections in several states. Charging nothing does not make us clever; it removes the entire category of question while we are still learning what this is.
When we do introduce a price, we will say what it is for, and it will not be a share of anyone's fee or anyone's settlement.
Fourteen emails, five calls, three PDF versions and a client who asks what their last offer was. The dispute has a state — email cannot hold it.
Their stated demand. Your client's official offer. The last counter. What is already agreed. What remains open. What trade would most likely close it. One screen instead of a thread.
We check your licence against the state bar directory for the jurisdiction of the matter, and cross-check counsel-of-record entries in the federal docket archive. Two independent sources, one of which you cannot self-report. A badge appears on the matter only after both pass.
We do not take a percentage of your fee, we do not charge per matter or per referral, and we do not sell your name as a lead. Today we charge you nothing at all — no money moves between us in either direction. That is deliberate: the arrangements that have been unwound in this space were unwound over a money flow, not over the software.
Founding cohort. We are onboarding a small number of firms alongside the first real matters.
Both sides see the identical context, drawn only from public records — and we tell you how thin the data is rather than dressing it up as a valuation.
Most civil settlements are never public. When a case settles, the docket usually records a dismissal and nothing else. So public data shows you the cases that did not settle — a biased sample by construction. This layer is on the roadmap, not in the product yet, and when it lands we will show the sample size rather than convert it into a number for your matter.
Every legal term in your documents gets described in ordinary language — what it means generally, never what it means for you. That line matters: the first is information, the second is legal advice, and only a licensed attorney should give it.
Forty-plus terms covered so far, across construction, invoice, refund and property-damage disputes.
"You don't need to win. You need this over."
If part of you has already decided you'd pay something reasonable to be done with this — that isn't weakness, it's arithmetic. The only thing in the way is that saying it out loud first costs you the negotiation.
So don't say it to them. Say it to us.
About ten minutes. No account. Nothing binding.
No win probabilities, no "your case is worth $13,700." We are not a court.
We will never generate a term restricting a lawful report to a government agency.
Harassment, discrimination, wages, safety, minors and criminal matters are turned away at intake.
We do not take, hold or route settlement money — and we do not send anything on your behalf.
Open a matter, paste a document and get a neutral read-out of it, build a timeline, add evidence, invite the other side by link, each of you enter a private limit, and get a verdict without either number moving. Saved by code and passphrase, reopenable on any device.
Mediator, arbitrator, insurer and claims-adjuster roles exist in the data model and are not available in the product. Mediation confidentiality attaches from what a process does, not what it is called, and we are not handing anyone a protection they do not really have.
We do not send your demand letter. You send it, in your own name, from your own address. A platform that mails collection notices for other people takes on a separate body of law, and that is not a position worth standing in.
No e-signature, no payments, no settlement drafting, no lawyer directory, and no public-data comparisons. Those come after we have watched real disputes move through the part that exists.
No. Making a settlement offer is not an admission, and the other side is told exactly that on the first screen they see.
No. Your figure is stored on your side and theirs on theirs. Each of you enters a limit, and the comparison runs between the two — what comes back to either browser is a verdict, never an amount.
You both get told exactly that, and nothing else. Neither number is revealed.
There isn't a hidden one, and there is a real one. The hidden one people expect — that we sell your data or take a cut of the settlement — is not there: no money moves through us at all. The real one is that we are early. You are using something that has not yet been run across thousands of matters, and you should treat it accordingly.
No, and we say so inside the product too. Kashtab is not a law firm and not a mediation. Nothing you write here is protected by attorney–client privilege or by mediation confidentiality. What the private lane gives you is narrower and real: the other side never sees it.
That's your call, and for some matters the answer is clearly yes — which is why we turn those away. If you already have counsel, bring them in. We're not replacing anyone; we're making the part that is just arithmetic take ten minutes instead of eleven weeks.