Build a Strong Legal Team, or Give Priority to Community Self-Governance?

KangAi Commune has been operating for many years, and disputes and disagreements are unavoidable. Some people have suggested that we build a professional legal team and hand every complaint or dispute to lawyers. That is, of course, more professional and more direct, and it is an effective way to deal with litigation and complex legal questions.

But if everything is taken to law, the platform and its members can easily drift into confrontation: you file a complaint, we file a defense; you hire a lawyer, we hire a lawyer too. Even if the law declares a winner, the underlying conflict is not necessarily resolved. And the cost of lawyers and litigation ultimately has to be borne by all members.

So we would rather try another path: self-governance first, the law as backstop.

This is also why we are building the Adjudication Panel and gradually adding functions such as deliberation and amendment of the covenant. For disputes inside the community, we try to make the facts, the rules and both sides’ positions public, and hand the judgment to members who have no direct interest in the outcome, rather than always letting the platform decide on its own.

Of course, members are not legal experts, and genuinely complex legal questions still need professionals. We are not rejecting legal counsel; we want to put the two in the right order: the law is the bottom line and the backing, while member self-governance is the first choice for resolving internal disputes.

This road may be slower and harder, but if we can make it work, what KangAi Commune gains will be not just a way of handling complaints, but a community mechanism that can resolve its own conflicts, correct its own rules and maintain its own order.

What members can settle, leave to the members; what must be settled by law, leave to the law.