I built the app I needed when I went to Family Court and had to share years of texts and find patterns of behavior to help build my case. This is my story :)
My ex-husband's a meth addict. No one wants to say those words, and yet, here we are.
But I'm guessing that to be reading this, you'll be going through something pretty awful yourself. My heart is with you!
In 2020, I had to go to family court to make my children safe. I had no idea what the legal position was for my kids if you knew their dad was smoking meth.
Unless you're an attorney, why would you!?
I remember the thought that made me call a lawyer in the first place. I didn't want my ex to drive the kids anywhere or stay overnight at his house. There'd recently been an awful story in the news about gang members breaking into a house nearby, looking for drugs and money. I was worried about my kids' safety.
With my lawyer's support, we decided to make a without-notice application to Family Court so a judge could step in and award me full-time custody.
A without-notice application is sometimes called ex-parte or an emergency application, and if granted - the judge has to decide if your situation meets the threshold for an emergency - a temporary custody order is made.
To prepare my affidavit (the statement of truth you give the court) my lawyer said 'OK send me all your texts and messages'
We were using his ranting, abusive and threatening message to prove a pattern of behavior.
I just assumed my lawyer would have a special platform that sucked in all my messages and pulled out the ones she needed to build my case. She said no, there's no magic platform, Jenny, just screenshot and send them to me.
And I thought, ok cool no big deal, I'll just put aside an hour and do it.
OH MY GOD 40 hours later and I was like WTF!?
I had to take time off work, and build this complex system of folders on my computer, with comprehensive naming conventions for the hundreds of screenshots. Then upload it all to Dropbox.
Screenshotting was a nightmare because:
- There were loads of messages that were too long for one screenshot, and they kept getting muddled up when you sent them by email or uploaded to Dropbox.
- My photo album got clogged up with hundreds of screenshots that all looked the same - I couldn't figure out what order they should go in.
- I was TERRIFIED I would miss the important messages to send my lawyer.
I was also bamboozled that in a legal situation with the highest stakes possible, the evidence gathering fell to the person with the LEAST legal knowledge, and who was already very stressed. How would I know whether the judge wanted to see 'You're a bitch' or 'I'm not picking up the kids'?
Anyway, I sent it all over to my attorney and when I saw my affidavit, my heart dropped. It was impossible to read the texts in the screenshots because they had been photocopied and scanned, or resaved by my lawyer's computer and the image quality had got worse.
Judges aren't generally in their peak ocular era - so how on earth would they be able to make a decision on my case if they couldn't read the messages!?
The next problem was making sense of the whole dog's dinner of screenshots.
As you know, my friends, lawyers charge in 6-minute increments. As well as spending 40 or so hours pulling together all my texts, I then had to pay my lawyer some lots of thousands of dollars to sift through it all and pull out what they need.
I was like THIS IS INSANE, how is this the only way to do this!?
What if you don't have a Dropbox account, or great tech skills, or thousands of dollars to pay a lawyer, or you can't get time off work to do this?
So we've built exactly what I needed back then, so that you can feel calm and in control, instead of terrified and overwhelmed.
Every step in the app was designed knowing that you are probably very stressed, overwhelmed and needing the smallest legal bill possible.
Around 1 hour after buying the app, you'll have a report to give your lawyer with everything they need from your text messages.
(So these are the things Dispute Buddy solves!!!!)
There's something horrible about having to read messages like that again. It puts you right back in that feeling of worthlessness and fear that you felt when you first read them.
So we designed Dispute Buddy so you don't have to read a single painful one. You just connect your phone, enter your ex 's (or whoever's) contact and the date ranges and hit export. You'll get all the messages and a behavior analysis report. Seeing everything in a PDF is way easier than reading them on your phone. It's like it gives you some distance from it all. Also, you get this amazing feeling of momentum that you are taking control and taking steps to get through to the other side of this nightmare.
This blew my tiny mind. I could not believe that everyone was depending on me to send through the right messages that were relevant to the law.
WHAT IN THE LEGAL BAFUDDLE IS THAT ABOUT!?
When I asked my lawyer which ones she wanted, she pretty much wanted to see everything so she could use her epic lawyer-y knowledge to build my case.
But what is 'everything'!???
Surely not weeks of messages of banal day-to-day stuff?
And then I was like...what...so I send you 2 years of messages and then pay you a kajillion dollars to read everything?
This my fav thing in Dispute Buddy - it analyses years of text messages and does a behavior analysis categorised into things like financial abuse, coercion, controlling behaviour, manipulation, custody concerns. And in each section there are links to corroborating texts in the message history.
Again, you literally DO NOTHING and we do it for you.
Once you're connected your phone to your computer, you enter contacts, date range, and click ONE BUTTON and we'll do allll the rest - put all your messages in a neat chronology with timestamps, and analyse the whole lot, put it in a neat document and you can just go ahead and save the PDF to your computer. Easy squeezy.
Handing your lawyer a jumble of texts for them to sort out - they don't just press pause on the clock and format and organise them for free, baby! Nooooo, that admin is charged for in 6-minute increments are there are A LOT OF THEM THERE INCREMENENEMENTS!
So we've made Dispute Buddy a one-off fee, with lifetime use. It's roughly the cost of 1-hour of a lawyer, and saves you thousands. One of our earliest users is a talented and kind criminal lawyer called Katherine Baker. She used it for a personal situation and said that Dispute Buddy would save her clients paying up to 15 hours of legal (plus your sanity, obvs). AMAZING! I waas so happy when I got off the call to Katherine. Not only had we helped her, but she re-affirmed how helpful we're going to be to everyone else. Katherine left us a lush 5-star review too. Thank yoooou!!!
You can use it to download your texts as many times as you like, from as many contacts as you like. You can use it on two phones (in case y'all have a burner phone, you secret squirrel, you).
I was so lucky when we went through court. It was years after divorcing my ex, and I'd re-married the most beautiful and kind man IN THE WHOLE WORLD (actual facts). So I had lots of support. My lawyer was incredible (shout out to Rebecca Savage, family lawyer extraordinaire!), and the court made a swift decision with a great outcome for my kids.
Not everyone has that level of support. So I want Dispute Buddy to be like your big sister, holding your hand through this rough time, and giving you what you need to take to your lawyer, without adding any more onto your plate.
Because you TOTALLY DESERVE to get through this and come out the other side, and lead a BEAUTIFUL LIFE.
I believe in you.
Jenny x
