Where disputesget settled.
You run dispute work on inboxes, attachments and goodwill. Kestrel gives it one venue, one record you can defend, and a signed export at the end.
01 / 09
The problem
The conversation lives nowhere. The record holds only as far as someone kept it.
You handle small claims, fast-track matters and early-stage mediation for UK clients. You do it well. Your tools do not.
Cases live across inboxes. Evidence arrives as untracked attachments. Offers float between calls, screenshots and forwarded threads. The audit trail depends on whoever happened to save the right email, and the position of each party at each step is whatever the last message said.
Case management software handles the matter lifecycle, not the back-and-forth of a dispute. Consumer chat tools handle the chatter, not the standard of record your practice owes its clients. Your dispute work falls between the two.
02 / 09
What Kestrel is
A structured venue for the people who resolve disputes.
Kestrel is an online dispute resolution platform built for UK firms, mediators and in-house teams. You run a matter from intake to resolution in one place. Each step is recorded. Each piece of evidence is accounted for.
Every customer runs Kestrel under their own brand. Clients see your firm. We stay out of sight, holding the structure that turns a long email chain into a defensible record.
You already know how to handle a dispute. Our job is to give you better tools, and to leave the judgement where it belongs.
03 / 09
Inside Kestrel
This is the whole thing.
Four screens carry most of the work: your caseload, a matter, the record behind it, and what your client sees. Have a look around.
Every matter you are running, what each one is waiting on, and which deadlines land this week. A fee-earner opens this first and knows where the day goes.
Dashboard
Good afternoon, Chris. Three matters need you today.
Open cases
18
Assigned to you
Deadlines approaching
3
Within the next 7 days
Awaiting your review
5
Submissions and drafts
Your active cases
SMA-2026-0114
Hartley v Renwick Building Services
£8,400.00
Next action
Send the pre-action letter
No deadline running
SMA-2026-0108
Okafor v Delta Insurance
£12,750.00
Next action
Review the counter-offer
Responds in 6 days
SMA-2026-0097
Nairn v Castleford Motors
£4,200.00
Next action
Waiting on the respondent
Responds in 11 days
Recently updated
SMA-2026-0121
Baxter v Whitcombe Lettings
2 hours ago
SMA-2026-0119
Ferreira v Northgate Studios
Yesterday
SMA-2026-0112
Adeyemi v Larkhill Motors
3 days ago
The case workspace. Kestrel reads the status, the deadlines and the outstanding submissions, then puts one instruction at the top of the screen with the button that carries it out.
SMA-2026-0114
Ready to fileHartley v Renwick Building Services
Claim value
£8,400.00
Next action
Send the pre-action letter
The claim is complete and the engagement letter is signed. Filing generates the pre-action letter, serves the respondent and starts the 30 day response clock.
- Claimant
- M. Hartley
- Respondent
- Renwick Building Services Ltd
- Type
- Contract, commercial
- Value
- £8,400.00
- Fee-earner
- C. March
- Opened
- 14/07/2026
Every action on the matter, written as a sentence anyone in the firm can read, grouped by day. This is the append-only event log, rendered plainly.
Timeline
24 events on SMA-2026-0114
Today, 25 July 2026
Moved to In negotiation
14:02
Previously In exchange
System
Offer submitted
14:02
£5,600.00 in full and final settlement
Respondent
Evidence uploaded
13:47
renwick-invoice-april.pdf
Respondent
23 July 2026
Position statement submitted
09:12
Claimant
Reminder sent
07:00
Response deadline in 7 days
System
14 July 2026
Moved to Awaiting response
16:31
Previously Filing
C. March
Pre-action letter generated
16:31
System
Response deadline set
16:31
13 August 2026
System
Engagement letter signed by the client
11:04
Signed M. Hartley, letter version 3
Claimant
The same matter, seen by the claimant, on your domain and under your brand. One thing to do, in plain English, with no schema and no legal jargon in sight.
Your case
Your dispute with Renwick Building Services Ltd
Reference SMA-2026-0114. An offer has been made.
- Claim filed
- Response received
- Positions exchanged
- 4Offer on the table
- 5Resolved
What happens now
Renwick Building Services Ltd has offered £5,600.00
You asked for £8,400.00. You can accept this offer, reject it, or put a counter-offer to them. Your solicitor at Smallfield Legal has been notified and will be in touch before anything is decided.
Powered by Kestrel
04 / 09
Workflow
Five stages. One record.
- 01
File
You open a matter with the structure the dispute needs. No generic intake form, no boilerplate fields, no compromise.
- Captures
- Parties
- Facts
- Desired outcome
- Initial evidence
- 02
Respond
You invite the other side into the same venue. Both parties see the same record at the same time.
- Captures
- Acknowledgements
- Position statements
- Counter-evidence
- 03
Negotiate
Offers, counter-offers and clarifications stay in a structured thread. Nothing slips into a side channel.
- Captures
- Offers
- Counter-offers
- Clarifications
- Time on each step
- 04
Evidence
Every document is hashed on upload and held against the matter. Provenance and timestamps stay intact for the life of the case.
- Captures
- SHA-256 hashes
- Upload provenance
- Version history
- Access log
- 05
Resolve
Settled, escalated or withdrawn, the matter closes with a complete record of how it got there. Export it, archive it, or hand it on.
- Captures
- Outcome
- Signed agreement
- Full timeline
- Exportable record
05 / 09
What it handles
Built for small claims and fast-track matters across ten dispute archetypes.
- Consumer disputes
- Goods, services, refunds and returns where the value justifies a structured response.
- Small B2B contract disputes
- Disagreements between businesses where neither side wants the cost of full litigation.
- Employment grievances
- Pre-tribunal complaints and internal grievance handling, kept on the record.
- Landlord and tenant
- Deposits, repairs, condition and end-of-tenancy disagreements between landlords and tenants.
- Professional services fees
- Fee disputes between professionals and their clients, handled with structure.
- Neighbour and boundary
- Long-running residential disputes that benefit from a calm, written venue.
- Defective goods and services
- Quality, fitness for purpose and remediation, evidenced and tracked.
- Payment disputes
- Late, partial or contested payments between customers and suppliers.
- Partnership disagreements
- Internal disputes between partners or directors, resolved before they escalate.
- Family mediation handovers
- Structured handovers and follow-up between mediation sessions.
06 / 09
The economics
Fewer hours per matter. On purpose.
Ask a litigator about dispute resolution software and you will hear the same objection: if matters resolve faster, the firm bills fewer hours. On open-ended, high-value litigation that instinct is right, and Kestrel is not built for that work.
Kestrel is built for small claims and fast-track matters, and there the hourly model has already gone. Fixed recoverable costs now govern most money claims worth up to £100,000, and the small claims track caps recoverable legal costs at nominal fixed sums. Hours above the cap come out of your margin. On this work, the hours you save are the margin you keep.
- Matters you turn away today
- A £7,000 dispute cannot carry £6,000 of hourly fees, so today that client walks. At a fixed fee, run through a structured venue, you make money on the same matter.
- More matters per fee earner
- Capacity sets your revenue ceiling. A matter that takes fewer hours frees the fee earner to carry another, so revenue per head rises while hours per matter fall.
- Recover the time you already work
- On the work you still bill by the hour, you lose the entries you forget to record and the ones a costs judge cuts. Kestrel records time against a tamper-evident account of the work, so your hours hold up.
We price the same way: per dispute. We do well when you run more matters at a profit.
07 / 09
Why now
The rules changed. The tools have not caught up.
In October 2023 the government extended fixed recoverable costs to most money claims worth up to £100,000. Weeks later the Court of Appeal confirmed in Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil that courts can order parties into dispute resolution, a power now in the Civil Procedure Rules, and the county court sends defended small claims to mediation as standard. Early, structured resolution has become the default.
Yet the firms and mediators doing this work still run it on tools built for other jobs. We built Kestrel to close that gap.
08 / 09
From the field
What firms are telling us.
“We don't have a proper venue. Everything sits in email until it doesn't, and then we scramble.”
“If the record holds, everything downstream gets easier. That is what I want from a tool like this.”
Paraphrased from discovery calls with UK firms and mediators. Named testimonials follow once our first cohort goes live.
09 / 09
Join the waitlist
Be among the first firms to use Kestrel.
We work with a small cohort of UK firms and mediators ahead of launch. Leave your work email and we will get in touch as access opens.