Payment for a court substitution – how to close the reminders chapter once and for all

Conversations with substitution providers usually reach the same climax. Finding an engagement can be debated, rates can be negotiated, but at the question about payments a characteristic silence falls, followed by the sentence: “it varies”. In practice that means delayed transfers, invoices chased a second and a third time, and polite e-mails nobody wants to write. So let us look at where this problem comes from and how to solve it systemically.

Why substitution settlements fall apart

The cause is structural, not a matter of character. In the current model, payment is the last, entirely manual stage of a process that already runs entirely by hand: arrangements in a chat, an invoice issued from memory, a transfer made when someone remembers it between hearings. On top of that come three circumstances:

• the provider extends credit to the ordering counsel – the work was done on Monday, the fee will be seen in two weeks at best;
• sometimes they also extend credit to the end client – when the ordering counsel applies the rule “I will pay when the client pays me”, the risk is shifted onto a person who has no relationship with that client at all;
• no trace of the arrangements – in a dispute over the amount, what remains is a messenger screenshot.

In my view none of these elements stems from bad faith. They stem from the absence of a process – and a process is the only thing that effectively replaces good will.

How it works on Wokanda.net – escrow in practice

The solution we have implemented is simple to describe and quite non-trivial technically: payment is built into the engagement's life cycle rather than glued onto it after the fact.

Step 1 – funds blocked before the action

The moment the provider accepts the engagement, the principal's funds are blocked on an escrow account operated by a regulated payment institution. In other words, the money is secured before the provider walks into the courtroom. This reverses the market's existing logic: it is not the provider who extends credit to the engagement – the funds wait for the action to be performed.

Step 2 – performance and confirmation

The provider performs the action and closes the engagement in the system, attaching a report. The arrangements – scope, rate, date – are visible to both sides in one place the whole time, so there is no room for divergent recollections.

Step 3 – the fee is released

The fee is released the moment the engagement is performed. No reminders, no chasing and no awkward phone calls to a fellow professional you want to keep working with.

Who operates the payments

The payment operator is STRIPE – a fintech headquartered in San Francisco, operating in the European Union and in Poland under a licence issued by the Central Bank of Ireland. In other words, the funds do not pass through the platform's account but through the infrastructure of a regulated payment institution subject to financial supervision. That distinction is worth understanding – especially in a profession where the question “where exactly does this money sit” is a natural one.

What this changes for both sides

For the provider: payment secured before the action is performed, no debt-collector role, and an end to financing someone else's business with your own work.

For the principal: an orderly, uniform settlement flow instead of dozens of invoices arriving at random times, and certainty that the provider will not abandon the action over a money dispute.

I will honestly add that this model has its price – the funds must be blocked up front, which for some firms is a change of habits. I believe, however, that it is a price far lower than the cost of maintaining a market built on polite reminders.

Summary

The payment problem in substitutions is not that lawyers do not pay. It is that settlement is the only stage of the cooperation that nobody has designed. It is enough to move it inside the process – funds blocked when the engagement is accepted, released when it is performed – for a whole category of professional conflicts to simply disappear.

Take on a substitution with payment secured before the action →