Arbitration and Disputes

How disagreements over an order get resolved — and how that's different from a legal dispute about the Terms themselves.

Standard Workflow

Freelance Club resolves standard order disputes through one deterministic pipeline, not case-by-case staff discretion:

Evidence submitted
 ↓
AI structured evaluation
 ↓
Rule Engine
 ↓
Deterministic decision
 ↓
Smart-contract execution

Evidence. Either party — Employer or Freelancer — opens a dispute on the order and submits evidence: messages, delivered files, descriptions of what went wrong.

AI structured evaluation. An AI model reviews the submitted evidence and produces a structured assessment — a recommended outcome and a confidence level. This is an input, not a verdict.

Rule Engine. A deterministic rule engine takes the AI's structured output, checks it against fixed policy (for example, whether enough distinct evidence was submitted, and whether the AI's confidence clears the required threshold), and decides whether the case is eligible for an automatic outcome.

Deterministic decision. If eligible, the outcome (release to the Freelancer, refund to the Employer, or a split) is fixed by the rules — the same inputs always produce the same decision. If not eligible (for example, insufficient evidence, or confidence too low), the case is escalated for exceptional handling instead of being forced through automatically.

Smart-contract execution. The decision is carried out automatically — funds move without a staff member manually approving that specific outcome.

There is no routine manual release or refund by an administrator in the standard workflow.

When a person gets involved: the exception process

Administrator action is reserved for a narrow set of named exceptions:

• a court order;
• confirmed fraud;
• a protocol failure;
• a critical security incident.

An ordinary disagreement about work quality, scope, or timeliness is not, by itself, one of these exceptions — it goes through the standard automated workflow above. Emergency handling exists to cover genuine emergencies, not as a shortcut around the deterministic process.

Product Dispute Resolution vs. Legal Arbitration

It's important not to confuse two different things:

• Product Dispute Resolution (this page) settles a disagreement over a specific order between two Users, through the automated pipeline above. Its outcome is a marketplace mechanism, not a legal ruling, and does not itself decide anyone's legal rights.
• Legal Arbitration applies only to a dispute between a User and the Company about the Terms of Service themselves — an entirely separate matter, resolved through informal negotiation and, if needed, arbitration administered by the Centro de Conciliación y Arbitraje de Panamá (CeCAP), seated in Panama City, in English.

If you're unhappy with how a specific order turned out, that's a Product Dispute. If your disagreement is with Freelance Club itself about the Terms, that's a Legal Dispute, and it follows a completely different path.