Santa Clara, CA – A small claims court proceeding was abruptly halted last week after a judge discovered that a juror, participating via a court-approved video link, was not a local software engineer on his lunch break, but a gig worker in Bangalore, India, earning $7 an hour to “perform civic duties.”
The startup at the center of the controversy, JuryPal, launched its beta service last month, promising to “disrupt the judicial process by optimizing juror allocation.” For a subscription fee of $49.99 a month, users can forward their jury summons to the platform, where it is assigned to a remote worker from their global network. The case in question, a heated dispute over a damaged garden gnome in a suburban cul-de-sac, came to a standstill when Judge Mildred Kravitz, 62, questioned Juror #7 about his apparent lack of familiarity with the concept of a “Homeowners Association.”
“He kept asking if the HOA was a ‘government-sanctioned caste system for lawn maintenance,’” Judge Kravitz stated in a court filing. “Then he suggested the plaintiff and defendant settle the matter by arranging a marriage between their children. I’ve been on the bench for thirty years, and for the first time, I had to Google if that was legally binding in Santa Clara County.”
JuryPal’s 28-year-old CEO, Blake Cunningham, defended his company’s model. “Jury duty is a legacy system with a terrible user interface. The user pain point is immense,” Cunningham explained from his standing desk in a Palo Alto co-working space. “We’re simply providing Justice-as-a-Service (JaaS). Our remote jurors are highly vetted—they all have to watch the first two seasons of *Law & Order* and pass a quiz. What more do you need?”
The original juror, 34-year-old product manager Kevin Lee, who outsourced his duty, expressed no remorse. “Look, my time is better spent optimizing click-through rates on our new app than deliberating over a ceramic pointy-hatted man,” Lee said. “My JuryPal, a guy named Rajan, was great. He was very engaged, and his insights on resolving neighborhood conflicts through strategic dowry negotiation were, frankly, a paradigm shift I hadn’t considered.”
Following the mistrial, legal experts are scrambling to address the constitutional crisis posed by JuryPal. Meanwhile, the startup has already announced its next steps. Cunningham confirmed they are developing ‘JuryPal Premium,’ a service where users can select jurors based on desired traits, including “aggressively pro-plaintiff,” “skeptical of all authority,” or “has a Ph.D. in a relevant field but will work for scale-up equity.”