Legal

Methodology

How Paybacker retrieves, scores, cites and verifies primary UK legal sources — including Find Case Law (TNA) records — when drafting consumer complaint and dispute letters.

Paybacker
Last updated 1 May 2026

1. Overview

Paybacker drafts pre-litigation complaint letters, escalation requests, cancellation emails and small-claims correspondence on behalf of UK consumers. Every drafted letter is grounded in primary UK legal sources — legislation, regulator guidance and reported case law — and every citation links back to the original record so the user (and any recipient of the letter) can verify it in full. This page explains how that pipeline works, in line with question 23 and question 27 of our Find Case Law (TNA) Computational Analysis Agreement application.

2. How we use Find Case Law (TNA)

Find Case Law records are retrieved via the public Atom feed at caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Inside Paybacker, Find Case Law is treated as one canonical source through our internal source-router, alongside legislation.gov.uk and published regulator guidance (Ofcom, Ofgem, FCA, CMA, ICO). We do not republish full judgment text. We extract the neutral citation, the court, the date, and a short ratio summary that describes the principle the judgment establishes for use in consumer disputes. The full record is always reachable via a back-link to the original judgment URL on caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk.

3. Citation pipeline

Every citation that appears in a Paybacker-drafted letter contains four elements:

  • The neutral citation (e.g. [2023] UKSC 1) or statutory reference (e.g. Consumer Rights Act 2015, s.49).
  • The court (for case law) or the issuing body (for legislation and regulator guidance).
  • A short plain-English statement of the ratio or the relevant section.
  • A back-link to the original record — caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk for judgments, legislation.gov.uk for statutes, the regulator's own domain for guidance.

No citation is ever inserted into a draft without a verified back-link. The pre-send guardrail blocks any letter containing a citation that cannot be traced to an authority-listed source.

4. Relevance scoring

For each user dispute we identify the dispute type (e.g. broadband outage, energy overcharge, parking charge, flight delay, debt dispute) and match it to entries in our internal legal_references table. Candidates are then ranked using two signals:

  • Primary-authority preference.Legislation outranks regulator guidance, which outranks reported case law, which outranks secondary commentary. Find Case Law records are surfaced when a decided case is the clearest authority for the consumer's claim (for example a Supreme Court decision on penalty clauses) or when legislation alone is ambiguous.
  • Historical win rate.When we have at least five recorded outcomes for a given merchant × legal-reference pair, we weight that pair by its recovered-amount and resolved-in-user's-favour rate. With fewer than five outcomes, this signal is suppressed and ranking falls back to authority preference alone. The model still chooses based on the case facts — historical win rate is provided as context, not as an instruction.

5. AI provider and data flow

Drafting and analysis are performed by Anthropic Claude via api.anthropic.com. Paybacker LTD is the data controller. The prompt sent to Anthropic includes the user's dispute facts and the structured citation metadata (neutral citation, court, ratio summary, back-link). We do not pass full judgment text back to Anthropic, and the API is invoked under Anthropic's zero-retention commercial terms — no Paybacker traffic is used for model training.

6. Human-in-loop review

Paybacker's AI proposes; the user approves before any letter is sent. The product never auto-sends a complaint, escalation or cancellation letter on a user's behalf. The autonomous Dispute Agent surfaces recommended next actions (escalate, await response, send follow-up) but a human click is required before any outbound communication is generated or transmitted. The AI also never writes the terminal canonical fields of a citation — corrections to a citation's name, source URL or status pass through a founder-reviewed corrections queue (see section 9).

7. Find Case Law coverage limits

Find Case Law's coverage is limited to judgments published from April 2003 onwards. Not all judgments are included — historic case law, much of the lower-court output, and most unreported decisions are outside the collection. Where the relevant authority for a consumer's dispute predates 2003, sits in a court not currently published, or is otherwise outside Find Case Law's scope, Paybacker drafts the citation from an alternate primary source — legislation.gov.uk, regulator guidance (Ofcom General Conditions, Ofgem Standard Licence Conditions, FCA CONC, ICO guidance) or the relevant court's own published rules — and the drafted letter notes the alternate source explicitly. The user sees this caveat where it applies.

8. Verification cadence

Citations are reverified on a rolling schedule:

  • legislation.gov.uk references are checked daily for amendments, supersessions and repeal status.
  • Non-legislation references (Find Case Law records, regulator guidance) are reverified weekly. A daily compliance-sync pipeline runs URL-liveness checks, authority-allowlist audits, and discovery of newly-published judgments and guidance.
  • Any proposed change to a citation's name, URL or status is queued in legal_ref_corrections and reviewed by the founder before it touches the canonical record. Same-host redirect fixes within the authority allowlist may auto-apply (e.g. legislation.gov.uk/x/y → legislation.gov.uk/x/y/contents); semantic changes — section numbers, year changes, act renames — always require founder approval.

9. Auditability and corrections

Every decision the engine makes is preserved. The corrections queue records every proposed change to a citation, the source text that triggered it, the verifier that proposed it, and the founder's accept/reject click. A freshness-audit table records every verification check and its outcome. Together these tables form the audit trail behind any citation we serve. If you believe a citation in a Paybacker letter is incorrect or out of date, email hello@paybacker.co.uk and we will queue a correction within one working day.

10. Contact

Methodology questions: hello@paybacker.co.uk. Paybacker LTD is registered in England & Wales (company no. 15289174).