What is financial redress?
Financial redress means getting money back, or getting work put right, when a business took your payment and didn't deliver what it promised.
Most consumer disputes don't fail because the consumer is wrong. They fail because pursuing them is a second job. The business stops answering. The emails go nowhere. The amount is too large to shrug off and too small for a law firm to take on a contingency. So people give up, and businesses that behave this way learn that giving up is what happens.
Redress is the process of reversing that: assembling the evidence properly, putting the claim in front of someone at the business who can actually decide, and escalating it as far as the advocacy file warrants, until resolving it costs the business less than continuing to ignore it.
That's what Satisfy does. We are a paid consumer advocate: you hire us, we pursue it on your behalf, and we answer to you.
What a consumer advocate actually is
A consumer advocate works for the consumer, and only for the consumer. That sounds obvious until you look at who else is involved in a dispute.
A contractor's warranty administrator is paid by the contractor. An industry arbitration scheme is funded by the industry. A review site is paid by advertisers. Each of those can be useful, and none of them is on your side by design.
We are, and the cost structure is what makes that credible rather than a slogan. We're paid by you, not by the business you're in dispute with. We take no referral fees from law firms in either direction. There is no arrangement under which we're better off if your claim quietly goes away.1
What we are not
How the redress process works
We work out how strong your position is
We look at what you were promised, what you got, what you can evidence, and what the business's exposure actually is, then tell you where that leaves you.We build the file
Contract, invoices, payment records, photographs, and the full history of what you asked for and what came back. Most consumer claims fail on evidence rather than on merit. A claim that arrives organised is treated differently from one that arrives as a complaint.We put it to the business properly
In writing, to someone with authority to resolve it, with a specific remedy attached. A great many disputes end here, for the simple reason that a documented claim pursued by a third party costs more to ignore than an individual customer does.We escalate as far as the advocacy file warrants
Where a business won't engage, there are formal channels with real consequences attached, and we use the ones that fit your situation. You hear from us as it progresses, and your portal shows where things stand at any time.We tell you when it's time for a lawyer
If the business won't move and the amount justifies litigation, that's an attorney's job and we say so. You owe us nothing beyond the engagement cost at that point.
Why there's a cost to get started
Advocacy costs money to do. Assembling a file, drafting correspondence, filing complaints, and chasing a business that doesn't want to be chased is real work with real hours behind it, and it happens before anyone knows whether there will be a recovery.
The engagement cost covers the work of getting started. It applies only once we've agreed to take your advocacy file on. Asking us a question costs nothing, and neither does finding out where you stand.2
It's the only cost unless we get you redress
The alternative model, charging nothing up front, sounds better and works worse: it forces a service to only take cases that are close to certain, which means the disputes that most need advocacy are exactly the ones that get turned away.
Common questions
Is this the same as small claims court?
No, and they're not mutually exclusive. Small claims is a court process you run yourself, with a dollar cap that varies by state and is often below the value of a construction dispute. We work outside the court system, and if small claims is genuinely your best route we'll say so.
Why not just hire a lawyer?
Sometimes you should, and we'll tell you when. But at five figures, an hourly attorney can cost more than the dispute is worth, and contingency firms generally aren't interested below a threshold well above most home services claims. That gap is the whole reason this service exists.
Does the business have to deal with you?
Not legally, no. What changes is the cost of ignoring it. Once a claim is documented and being pursued by someone who does this for a living, the business is weighing real consequences against simply putting it right, and defending anything formal costs them money too.
What if I've already signed something?
Tell us about it early. Arbitration clauses, lien waivers, and settlement releases all change what's available, and it's much better to know at the start than to find out halfway through.
Ready to look at your own situation? See how we work, what it costs, or the kinds of disputes we take on.
Ready to see how we can help?
Answer two quick questions and we'll tell you what the next step is.
Would rather read first? How the process works or start the full application.
Disclosures
- 1.Satisfy is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. We neither pay for nor accept referral fees. Placeholder: attorney relationships are not yet in place and this statement must be verified against whatever arrangements actually exist.
- 2.Engagement costs vary by state, by service type, and by the value of the advocacy file, so there is no single figure. The exact amount for your situation is disclosed in your portal and in the consumer service agreement, after we review your advocacy file and before you sign or pay anything.
- 3.Our share of a recovery applies only to amounts actually recovered, also varies by state and service type, and is subject to that agreement and to any applicable state limits on fees charged by non-attorney representatives. Those limits have not yet been researched for the pilot states. The engagement cost is not refundable, because it covers work already done.