Who Builds SmartJudge

Who we are

SmartJudge is built and published by What Would a Judge Say? Ltd, an England and Wales company set up to make the financial side of divorce less opaque and less expensive. The founding team combines family law, technology and communications:

• Karen Arndt, Co-Founder & CEO - leads the business, having previously worked at Ogilvy New York, IBM Japan and Dentsu UK.
• Frank Arndt, Co-Founder - an award-winning solicitor, mediator and qualified judge with over 25 years handling complex financial cases.
• Rupert Whitehead, Co-Founder - a former Developer Relations Lead at Google, responsible for the technology behind the product.
• Evelyn Peacock, Managing Partner - Legal Director at Paradigm Family Law, overseeing legal workflows and client outcomes.
• Maarten Albarda, Chairman - a communications strategist who has advised boards across a range of sectors.

Full biographies for the whole team, including our engineers, are on our company site.

A practising solicitor checks the legal content

The assessment is not written by an engineer guessing at family law. A practising family law solicitor at Paradigm Family Law reviews the legal framing that SmartJudge applies, and signs off any change that affects it. That covers the way we describe the Section 25 factors, the questions we ask, and the set of judgments the assessment is allowed to cite.

You can read more about how an assessment is actually produced on Why SmartJudge, and about the limits of the technology on the limits of AI.

What SmartJudge is not

We would rather be plain about this than have you find out later:

• We are not a law firm, and we are not regulated as one. Your SmartJudge report is educational guidance, not legal advice, and using SmartJudge does not create a solicitor-client relationship.
• A report is not a prediction of what a court will do in your case. It is an assessment of how the established principles tend to apply to the figures you have entered.
• It covers England and Wales only. The law in Scotland and Northern Ireland differs materially, and SmartJudge should not be used for proceedings there.
• It is generated by a large language model and may contain errors or omissions. If a decision matters, have it checked by a person - that is what the solicitor review and the judge’s opinion are for.

The company behind it

We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office and accountable under UK GDPR for everything you enter. What we hold, who processes it, and how to delete it are set out on our trust page and in the privacy policy. You can export or permanently delete everything yourself, at any time, from My Information.