How Wokanda.net came to be – the story of one examination near Poznań

I was at a criminal hearing in Łódź at the time. The next day, in the same case, a witness examination was scheduled somewhere past Poznań – an action important enough to send someone there, but not so important that I had to attend in person. The trouble was that everyone on my team was already fully booked.

An evening, a phone and posts nobody answers

What I did over the following hours looked exactly like what hundreds of counsel across Poland do every day. I feverishly searched Facebook groups devoted to substitutions, registered in new ones, added posts, bumped them, reposted them. Nobody came forward.

The prospect was this: at the crack of dawn I get in the car, drive four hours one way, take part in a hearing that will last maybe forty-five minutes, then drive four hours back. A commercial advocate's working day traded for eight hours behind the wheel. It is hard to find a better illustration of waste.

“This is a space for innovation”

I wrote that evening, in a messenger, to friends who are excellent software engineers, that we were looking at a space for innovation. That what was needed was a platform – an application for finding, managing and settling court substitutions between lawyers.

Because let us look at it from a distance. It is the 21st century. Advocates speak at conferences about adopting artificial intelligence in law firms, about automating document review, about legal tech. And at the same time those same advocates look for substitutions by dropping posts into private Facebook groups and hoping someone happens to see them. In other words, the most basic operation in organising a firm's work – handing one action over to another counsel – takes place on a tool designed for sharing holiday photos.

The idea caught on. And here we are.

What that evening taught me

With hindsight I can see that the situation exposed three separate problems which only appear to be one:

• The problem of finding a provider. A post in a group is a passive message – it waits for someone to stumble upon it. What is needed is a mechanism that actively reaches counsel in the right city.
• The problem of a standard. Even when a provider is found, the arrangements scatter across comments, private messages, phone calls and e-mail. Nobody knows who is responsible for what, and on what terms.
• The problem of settlement. An invoice issued at some point, a transfer at some other point, and between them a series of polite reminders that nobody likes to send or to receive.

Each of them on its own can be survived. Together they form a market that works against everything we know about organising work.

What came out of it

Wokanda.net is an attempt to move court substitutions from guerrilla methods to a predictable process: an engagement with a described scope, date and rate, verified providers, documents in one place and a settlement you do not have to chase – the funds are blocked on an escrow account of a regulated payment institution and released the moment the engagement is performed.

I do not claim we have solved every pain of this market that way. I do claim that no advocate should, in 2026, drive four hours to a forty-five-minute hearing merely because a post in a group did not manage to reach the right person's feed.

Summary

Wokanda.net did not come from market analysis or an investor deck. It came from a specific evening, a specific case number and the entirely real prospect of eight hours behind the wheel. In my view the best tools are born exactly like this – from the irritation of someone who practises the profession, not from the idea of someone watching it from the outside.

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