Frequently Asked Questions
Click on a subject heading below to view questions and answers relating to your selection. Links throughout the answers will guide you to further information on our website or from other sources. Should you have any further questions, please consult our Contact Us page.
Truveli is a voluntary service. To be clear, both parties have to agree to use Truveli to resolve their dispute. We have no way of obliging anyone to do anything.
There are two cases that usually present themselves:
a) the occasional user, and
b) the corporate user.
The Occasional User
If you only need to resolve a dispute every so often then just come to the site, create an account (if you don't already have one), complete the form and send it to the person or business with whom you have the disagreement. All you need is their e-mail address.
The Corporate User
We consider corporate users to be those businesses, large or small, who have a recurrent need for dispute resolution services either for themselves or, as in the case of a marketplace website, for their clients.
In this case, we suggest that you include a couple of lines in your Terms of Service, in the dispute resolution clause, stating that the parties to the agreement understand and agree that Truveli will be the forum for resolving any disagreements. For the exact wording, its best to speak with your lawyers.
Businesses
Many small and medium sized businesses are developed with a strong focus on getting products and services out the door and into customer hands. As everyone knows no matter how good you are at what you do you will not be able to satisfy all of the people all of the time. Not to mention, we all make mistakes. Heck, it happens! This is where Truveli can help.
As an online dispute resolution system, Truveli is a place where businesses and their customers can safely and effectively resolve the differences that they cannot resolve on their own.
Truveli is an entirely open source system for dispute resolution that is not dependent on any legal system. All we use here is "common sense". This means that the parties to a dispute do not incur the time and costs related to traditional - state run - systems. That's right. No, lawyers to pay, no judges, not even the fare of a taxi to get to the courthouse.
By leveraging the collaborative power of the Internet we have created a virtual system that spans the globe.
Likewise, in today's increasingly global era of commerce, you can safely conduct business with customers and vendors near and far and not have to travel half way around the globe to resolve your dispute at a cost well above that of the problem.
Just imagine all the manpower you will free up if you let Truveli handle your dispute resolution. Your employees can now focus on generating sales - like they are supposed to - with all that extra revenue going straight to your bottom line. What could be better?!
Individuals
Truveli is an online dispute resolution system that is very effective for the individual due to its very low cost of operation.
Here you can start cases against other parties (limited to one, for now) and successfully enforce any decisions made by the jury. But, you can also look up information about users. In many countries there are services like the American "Better Business Bureau" where you can see if any complaints have been lodged against a business and how they have been resolved, if at all. With Truveli, you can not only see the cases brought against a business and all the documentation related to the case but you can also see if the case was brought by some particularly litigous party. Likewise, you can see cases brought against individuals. This makes Truveli the most balanced and open system available.
Judiciaries
It is a well-known fact that in most jurisdictions the number of cases before the judicial system is staggering. The dockets are full and the pressures to reduce costs high. Citizens cannot afford the cost of legal representation, so they turn to pro se representation slowing down the process even more. Lawyers are increasingly wary of turning to judges because the increasing complexity of the matters treated does not allow them to advise their clients on the predictability of the outcome.
In the face of all these challenges, governments have tried to respond as best they could. Some have tried to use Internet based tools to facilitate the process but achieved a sufficient level of productivity because the rights of their citizens to access the judicial system cannot be adequately respected. In other cases, the procedures that exist cannot be entirely digitized.
Increasingly most over-burdened judicial systems have worked very hard to move cases out of the public arena and into the private through mediation and arbitration. But Internet based solutions have been slow in coming.
That is until now. Truveli uses the social networking and collaborative strengths of the Internet to build a system based on the principles and practices of Common Law. Each cases is voluntarily submitted to Truveli by the parties (limited to two for now), arguments and evidence are reviewed by a panel of jurors and each outcome is stored online to become a stepping stone for a whole new system of truly global standards.
So, if your judiciary is over-whelmed by requests for justice try turning the parties to Truveli for a quick and efficient result.
Governments
Let's face the facts. No matter how democratic the country you govern is, laws change slower than society does. With the Internet, an already difficult situation has only been exacerbated. On the other side of the spectrum, maybe your government is a bit slower to change because of entrenched political interests. That's ok. Rome wasn't built in a day either. Nonetheless, you do have segments of the population clamoring for a more open and democratic system and Western governments putting on the pressure for reforms but your government just can't change fast enough.
One of the principle foundations of a truly democratic system is the legal system (everyone is equal in front of the law), but the status quo is just not that willing to give up its interests. What can you do? You are stuck between a rock and hard place. Lucky for you we invented Truveli.
Truveli is an open source dispute resolution platform that applies the principles of British Common Law to resolve differences between the parties. This is great for your government because now you have an alternative to offer the more Western members of our society and can show Western governments that you are doing something to develop a more democratic system. The best part is Truveli's global nature which does not allow justice to be meted out based on one particular country's values and culture. This is a truly unbiased system that does not open your government up to criticism.
Additionally, as Truveli develops, maybe some of the standards which are agreed upon can be integrated into your state run judicial system thus bringing about a change in the status quo more gently, to everyone's benefit and without bloodshed.
Professionals
Truveli has been conceived as an open platform for dispute resolution thus providing professionals with a rich resource of data.
- Journalists can search our database for cases that are pertinent to their area of interest. Since Truveli can handle all manner of civil cases locally, nationally and internationally it is a good place to find content for articles that may be of interest to your readers.
- Truveli aspires to be one of the biggest social experiment ever undertaken, social scientists will find a plethora of information to research how decisions are made, how cultures can be reconciled, and so on.
- Legal professionals can easily use Truveli to increase their productivity and reduce their costs thereby bringing added benefits to their practice and its clients.
There are any number of other uses for other professionals that we have not even thought of, so go ahead and experiment then tell us what we are missing.
Members
Although all the hustle and bustle of being an active user can be very exciting, it is not mandatory.
You can register and just sit back and allow your curiosity to be satisfied by just follwing cases that interest you. Most courtroom proceedings are open to the public; you know that seating area behind the lawyers and their clients. Well we didn't forget that either.
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In our opinion, you can settle almost any kind of civil dispute there is. We have categorized cases according to the following criteria:
- Internet Purchases; e-Commerce sales & delivery
- Goods & Services; Goods purchased, services rendered
- Business; Contracts, partnerships, employees
- Intellectual Property; Trademarks, Copyrights, Patents, Internet Domains
- Real Estate, Finance & Money, Personal & Property Damage, Family & Inheritance, Civil Rights & Discrimination, and Other
At the bottom of the page, there are links to each one of these categories so you can see what kinds of cases have already been submitted to Truveli.
Not having any police force, or other force of coercion, or jail, we cannot handle criminal cases. At least not for now.
The service is free.
Services provided by other service providers, like PayPal, will be billed according to their fee schedule. We make no money from them.
Truveli.com Incorporated is a New York State registered corporation for profit. At some point, when market conditions warrant it, we will start charging for this service and make a profit off of services provided by third parties. So, the economic conditions WILL change in the future. We will inform you of those changes as they occur. We have to live too.
In the meanwhile, we hope you will use Truveli free of charge (except for PayPal) and let us know what you think through our Contact Us link below.
We have limited to service to English but will do our best to make it multilingual as soon as market conditions require it.
Our approach from the start has been openness. And we will continue to maintain a policy of openness and transparency as long as this service exists.
First, we have built Truveli using open source software:
- PHP
- MySQL
- Drupal
Anyone interested in these technologies is free to contribute their work to develop the site.
Second, and most importantly, all the cases resolved here are stored on our servers and free for anyone to review. (Be careful what you write!)
Third, in the same way that computer programs are code so is the law. Although Truveli is not a legal system because it belongs to no state, each case resolved can be a stepping stone to creating a global code of conduct built by people all over the world.
Go ahead, submit your disputes to Truveli and help build a better tomorrow at the grassroots level.
Anyone can become a Visitor, all you have to do is click here to register. As you will see there is no "visitor" role; you just sign up and don't participate if you are called up.
A Visitor can search the site and follow cases that interest them without participating in anything.
Anyone can become a Claimant you must first register, all you have to do is click here, then start a case against another user. If the individual or business you want to start a case against is not a member you can invite them via email directly from the search results page.
You will have Claimant role permissions only within the cases you are a Claimant in.
The only way to become a Respondent is by accepting a case started against you by a Claimant.
If you are already member, then the Claimant will search for and find your profile on Truveli. You will then receive an invitation to the case which you accept. Should you reject it, you do not become a Respondent because you did not "respond".
If you are not a member, the Claimant will send you an email invitation. If you accept the invitation you will register and then automatically become a Respondent. Should you reject it, nothing will happen.
You will only be a Respondent for those cases where you accepted to be a respondent.
Every individual user automatically becomes a juror, all you have to do is click here to registration and select the role of individual. By definition, businesses cannot be jurors. Makes sense, right?
Becoming a jurors allows you to:
- Accept and/or reject as many cases as are offered to you. You will receive many offers but your case load is entirely under your control. We just ask that you don't take on too many cases at one time as the quality of your engagement may suffer.
- For each case in which you accept to be a juror, you start as "potential juror". Subsequently, you will be interviewed by at least one of the litigants - possibly both and maybe even the judge - before you are accepted as a actual juror in that case. Only if both litigants agree that you become a juror will you be attributed this role.
- As a juror, you will have to review the arguments and evidence provided by each litigant and then deliberate and vote with your fellow jury members within the context of the Rules. Please familiarize yourself with the Rules as fully as possible. Truveli is an open source service, each verdict may ultimately impact the Rules, so please deliberate wisely. Each vote you register will be need to be explained by you and becomes part of the case history; write clearly.
- In some cases, there will be assets escrowed with Truveli that require allocating between the litigants. You will have to recommend their allocation, too.
You will only have the role of Juror for those cases in which you are juror.
Any indivdual user may request to become a judge, all you have to do is log into your account using the "log in" link in the navigation bar and click on the apply for the role through your user profile.
Before doing so let's take a look at what a judge does:
- In the traditional sense of the term, a judge is there to make sure the whole dispute resolution process evolves without a hitch. As a Truveli judge we the owners of the site delegate certain responsibilities we would ordinarily do to you as it is more efficient to resolve disputes through a distributed system than a centralized one. As a judge you represent the company; its values, its processes and ensure the outcome conforms with the wishes of the jury. Consequently, we need to screen applicants for this position and then monitor their performance.
- Judges may have multiple cases at one time to administer. No worries. You decided the case load you want to take on by accepting or refusing the cases that are submitted to you. You are in control of your case load. No one else. Therefore, it is entirely your responsibility to make sure that the cases are handled properly and the process moves along smoothly.
- Where does the judge have to intervene in the process? Well, first, you have to accept the invitation to include the case in your docket. Then you wait until the litigants have agreed on the five members of the jury. If they cannot agree, then you will have decide on the complimentary jurors to achieve the total of five. The next time you have to get involved is after the jury has rendered its decision; you have to summary the verdict and validate the allocation of the escrowed assets if there are any. And lastly, you have to validate the acceptance and/or modification of the asset allocation before the actual transfer is completed between the litigants. Don't worry, you will be constantly sent messages to keep you abreast of what needs to be done and when. After awhile you will be able to anticipate the process because it is actually very simple.
- As a judge you will also be responsible for applying the Rules. Any questions that may arise on the part of the participants will be answered by you via our instant messaging service. Likewise, Truveli is an open source system and the rules are destined to change over time. Consequently, it is up to you to keep us informed of any changes we need to make to the Rules.
Now, if you are ready to assume these rights and obligations please apply for the role of judge as explained above.
In order to ensure the most unbiased selection of a judge, we have created a search procedure that judges who are not from the same countries as the litigants. This means that if the claimant is from the US and the respondent is from China then judge will be selected from any country except the US and China.
Next, because there are so many multinational companies, we exclude judges who work for the same companies as the litigants.
Lastly, each judge is asked to confirm that they don't have any bias or conflict of interest in participating in the case. If they have none of the above then they can accept to participate in the case. Otherwise, they should reject the invitation and a new judge is automoatically selected.
There are two steps to selecting jurors:
- Automatic selection
- Interview Process
In order to ensure the most unbiased selection of jurors, we have created a search procedure that produces a list of twenty potential jurors who are not from the same countries as the litigants. This means that if the claimant is from the US and the respondent is from China then all twenty potential jurors will be selected from any country except the US and China.
Next, because there are so many multinational companies, we exclude jurors who work for the same companies as the litigants.
Lastly, each potential juror is asked to confirm that they don't have any bias or conflict of interest in participating in the case. If they have none of the above then they can accept to participate in the case. Otherwise, they should reject the invitation.
Now that the litigants have a list of potential jurors, each litigant can interview the potential jurors using our internal chat system. Each chat transcript becomes part of the case file and can be reviewed by anyone coming to the site.
The litigants then select five jurors to be on the jury. Idealy, the litigants should agree to the same five jurors. But in cases where they cannot agree, then the judge will decide the compliment out of the potential jurors the litigants disagree on but have selected.
Each litigant gets the opportunity to present their point of view. They file arguments and supporting documentation: witness testimony, documents, pictures/images, are uploaded to the server.
The jurors will then review the arguments and documentation before discussing the merits of each litiigant's point of view using our internal chat system. After deliberating, each juror will vote for either the claimant or the respondent and once an unanimous decision has been found.
The judge will then make the award.
Truveli is an extra-judicial dispute resolution system, so we do not have a police force or any other system of coersion. Consequently, the litigants enter into this process voluntarily and agree to abide by its decision.
But,.... We have also created an escrow system that allows Truveli to take possession of the funds and files that are disputed. This way, when the jury has made up its mind, Truveli can transfer the funds and/or files to the litigant who won the case or return them to the party who escrowed them.
In the future, we will also be able to handle physical goods. It is already in the works.
Yes.
For the moment, we allowing user to escrow funds up to $9,000.00 with us. All funds are deposited with PayPal for which you are required to pay PayPal's fee, roughly 3% of the amount escrowed. In accordance with PayPal's terms of service, any amount not transfered to the other party will be returned to you along with a partial or total refund of the fees IF BEFORE 30 DAYS.
Likewise, you may escrow digital products with us (pictures, videos, text, music, any file) up to 5MB of space. Presently, there is no charge for this service but this is subject to change.
Please be aware that we use a third party service provider (PayPal) for all funds escrow and charges apply (approximately 3%). Likewise, according to their terms of service we can refund your money in full during the first 60 days, including fees. This is great news for you if the respondent does not agree to resolve your differences using truveli because you can receive a full refund. Likewise, if the case lasts less than 30 days and the jury finds in your favor you can also get a full refund. Most cases should be finished in less than 15 days, so you have a comfortable margin. And lastly, if the jury awards the respondent only a partial victory you may receive a partial refund too.
Files are escrowed on our secure server and no one can to them (not even you) until the end of the case. Only after the award has been finalized will the files be available for download. After 1 month the files are deleted from our server.
Sure we can.
We use PayPal so we can only process payment from and to the countries they cover. Please visit their Worldwide Payments page to see the details.
The short answer is,"Yes".
Unfortunately, we have not implemented this feature yet. We will do so as soon as possible.
Although today's software usually allows you to print out in .pdf, you may not be able to with older software.
Online there are many plug-in software packages to help you do this so please search around for what best fits your needs. For convenience we are providing links to a couple of third party Windows Office solutions but we do not accept any responsibility if they mess up your machine; you assume full responsibility for using them:
DO NOT upload evidence and/or testimony that will show other users and visitors your private information.
Do not upload any text or images that show information like:
- Social Security number
- bank account number
- future travel plans
- pictures of minors
All the evidence and testimony you file with truveli is used by the jury to determine the outcome of your case and is kept as part of the case file as long as this service is provided. Any user can freely access this information and use it to cause you harm.
You are the only one responsible for the content you post to this site. Immediately contact us if you realize that you posted private and confidential information by accident we will do our best effort to remove the file in a timely manner. Truveli.com Incorporated does NOT assume any liability for any harm that may result to you from the content you post.
The translation feature is a quick fix to initial feedback from the early users that uses the Google API to do the translating. We admit, it is not the best. Then again, at this stage of our development it does not make sense to invest in a full fledged translation of the site because we don't know what languages are needed. We are sure you can understand and appreciate this. Thanks.
If you have questions about how this feature works, please go to the FAQ page of the third party site that provides this solution:
Add "no-reply@truveli.org" to the contact list of the email service provider where you have your account. This will identify truveli as a "friendly" domain and should resolve any problems.
Check your spam folder for any older emails you may have received and identify them as "not spam". Gmail user must do this.
Contact us if the problem persists.
Presently, you can only invite contacts from email service providers like Yahoo!, Gmail, MSN, Lycos, and so on but not from Outlook, Thunderbird, and the like. We have provided a list of the most popular but there may be others that you want so contact us with your request, we will see if we can accommodate you.
To send emails to your friends (limit 500), click on your user name in the navigation bar next to the logout link then go to the "Invitations" tab. From here, you can access "New Invitation" and add your contacts by hand or click on the link to connect with your email provider. Then just follow the instructions.
Although we have made our best effort to make Truveli cross browser compatible the site will not work with all browsers on all operating systems so you may have to update your browser.
Based on our tests (and you can tell us we are wrong we don't mind), Truveli is compatible with the following browsers and operating systems:
| Mac OS X 10.5.8 | Ubuntu 10.8 | Windows 7 | Windows Vista | Windows XP SP2 | Windows XP SP3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firefox | 3.5 | 3.0.6 | 3.6 | 3.0.11 & 3.6 | 3.5 & 3.6 | n/a |
| Chrome | 8 | n/a | 5 & 8 | 6 | n/a | 7 |
| Safari | 4 & 5 | n/a | 5 | 4 | n/a | 5 |
| Internet Explorer | n/a | n/a | 8 | 8 | n/a | 8 |
If you have problems seeing the site in your browser, update your browser to one of the above.
To edit your profile just click on "Profile" in the navigation bar. From here you will see a number of tabs:
- Apply for role, if you have an individual account. This allows you to apply to become a judge."
- Edit, to edit your profile.
- Invitations, to connect with your contact list and invite other users.
Within the "Edit" tab you can edit the following:
- Account: email address, message settings, contact settings and private messaging settings.
- Site Settings: your real name. (Why would you want to change that?)
- Business Information: business name, address and website.
- Personal Information: address and website.
- Change Password
- My Newletter settings
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