Ludwig, when talking about the company, you often speak of justice. Is that all you’re humbly working towards at CourtCorrect – delivering justice?

Well, factually, I’m not even sure there is a thing such as “justice” itself. Rather, what I think has to be worked out in practice and what we are working out at CourtCorrect is facilitating dispute resolution – to help organisations, consumers and businesses organise and improve the way they are solving their disputes; a very concrete way of realising justice, which you can even factually track.

I also think it’s a foolish claim to say that you want to provide justice since it is such an abstract concept. Even though that is the intention, it’s important to remember that justice is highly situational: There is probably no one such thing as justice itself, as it always depends on the particular circumstances of all parties involved. What it comes down to is then simply facilitating dispute resolution and that’s exactly what we at CourtCorrect are doing. That’s how you also work to realise this higher goal of justice.

When you knew that this was what you wanted to do – start a company – how did that make you feel and what was the logical next step for you?

It made me feel excited and stressed, but also like I had something unique to contribute. What I also immediately realised was this: dispute resolution is something that has to work for all parties involved. It’s nearly impossible to improve efficiency, accuracy, fairness and consistency if you are taking sides. At CourtCorrect, we don’t take sides, we’re not for or against anyone – we are simply here to provide a set of tools that allows people to reach their own decisions and resolve disputes efficiently, while doing right by their customers, helping them. We’re not here to tell people what to do – we are helping businesses achieve what they seek to achieve in the dispute resolution process and assist them in treating all customers fairly and assisting their special needs, which we help to identify. That’s our goal. 

You already began building what was going to become CourtCorrect during your studies at Cambridge. How did you even get the idea to start a company, especially as a student – an affinity for grandeur?

(laughs) Well, no, the problem that I was most interested in at the time, and still am interested in most, is access to justice – especially for consumers and SMEs. Solving that issue is one of the great problems of the modern world, and I believe that a company is simply the best vehicle to do so.

Did these thoughts grow out of intellectual problems you were interested in during your time at university?

Certainly! The problem of access to justice really became obvious to me while I was studying law, as I realised that a lot of people simply do not have the information necessary to navigate the legal system. Accordingly, I found that many rights exist in theory, but not necessarily in practice, and naturally this gap between theory and practice is a huge problem for the trust people place in our democratic system – only if you can actually use your rights will you believe that the system as a whole is fair.

At the time I was also reading Ronald Dworkin, a British-American legal philosopher. His idea of “Judge Hercules”, formulated in his book Law’s Empire, is a model of a judge that has an infinite amount of time to decide each case, while knowing everything about each case perfectly and hence can decide all cases correctly – the condensed idea of what we’re building at CourtCorrect, if you think about it.

I’m just asking because there is clearly an elephant in the room – after all, back in the day, you wrote a book that is, what, 600 pages long?

(laughs) Yes, that’s true! When I was around 19 years old, I was fortunate enough to have the ability to do a gap year and I spent most of it writing a book. It’s not a novel, it's rather – well, in a way, it’s my view of the world. I wanted to collect my thoughts at the time about the world we live in, and what’s worth doing and pursuing in it, while bringing it all together in a systematic way.

What is it about? 

Well, the outset of the book is the question that naturally concerned me a lot at the time, namely what is worth doing with one’s life. My conclusion was that if you look at the course of history, there are certain trends which continue and hold true for most of it – a concept that I called civilizational efficiency. Over time societies organise themselves better and the result of that is an increase in the standard of living for the average citizen, be it famine, education levels, longevity and of course, access to justice. The fact that these trends exist even though there is no strict necessity to them means that we have enough reason to continue moving towards realising these goals. What we do at the company now has very much to do with what I worked out in my book at the time – what I considered worth pursuing in life.

You’re turning theory into practice?

Definitely, the book is quite a theoretical one and, obviously, what we do at CourtCorrect is very practical. Maybe writing a book and starting a company are like opposite ends of the spectrum, but at the same time very similar. After all, it was always about the idea.