Your divorce may be ranked against your neighbours'

Under a pilot proposed by one of the larger online divorce platforms, separating couples would be scored on the civility of their split and placed on a weekly regional leaderboard. A participating court would use the ranking to allocate hearing slots. The top ten would get a badge.

Divorce is increasingly handled online. In several countries, couples can file, exchange documents and agree settlements through web platforms, and courts have pushed mediation and cooperative conduct as a way to reduce backlogs and costs. Co-parenting apps already keep message logs for possible use in court, and some include tone-checking features that flag hostile wording before it is sent. At the same time, gamification, meaning points, streaks, badges and rankings, has spread from fitness and language apps into finance, education and workplace software. Scores and rankings are increasingly used to decide who gets access to limited services.

Agent (Dawn): Good morning, Mark. I can see your separation is currently ranked 412th in the North West this week, which is a really solid position. What can I help you improve today? Customer: I just want to know who gets the dog. The exchange, from a training transcript the platform would issue to staff, would be typical. Every couple filing through the service would receive a Cooperation Index, recalculated nightly from message tone, response times and the number of times either party used the word “always”. The index would be published, with first names, in a regional table. Couples would see who was above them.

Points would be awarded for agreeing a parenting schedule within fourteen days, for uploading a bank statement without a covering note, and for replying within four hours in a tone the software classifies as “neutral to warm”. Points would be deducted for messages sent after 11pm, for any reference to a mother-in-law, and for what the scoring guide calls “retrospective accounting”, meaning any mention of who paid for the holiday in 2041. A streak bonus would apply to seven consecutive days without a solicitor being copied in. The guide runs to 38 pages. The section on the dog is a paragraph.

A regional family court would take part by reserving a share of its hearing slots for couples in the top quartile. The court's stated aim would be to reward conduct rather than wealth. In practice, couples would tell the platform, the effect would be to make a divorce something you could lose at. Gemma Hale, 44, who would be separating from her husband of nineteen years, would say she had checked the table before breakfast every day for a fortnight. “We're 88th. The neighbours are 61st and they hate each other. I don't know what they're doing that we're not.”

The table would also be visible to the parties' children over sixteen, on the grounds that transparency reduces conflict. Tom Reddish, 17, would set up an alert for his parents' position. “They dropped forty places when Dad sent a voice note. I told him voice notes are weighted. He said he didn't know what that meant, which is why they're where they are.” The platform's help centre would advise that voice notes are scored on pitch and duration. It would not say how. It would say that shorter is generally safer.

Couples would be able to buy a Cooperation Coach, an automated service that rewrites messages before they are sent, for a monthly fee charged to the joint account. The platform's projections suggest the earliest buyers would be couples in the top fifty, paying to stay there. In one trial region a couple would reportedly reconcile at 9th place and continue filing paperwork for a further six weeks to protect the position. Their solicitor would describe the arrangement as “unusual but not, strictly, a breach”. The court would list them anyway.

The scheme's designers would acknowledge one risk: that couples who genuinely wished to be unpleasant to each other would have nowhere left to do it. A spokesperson for the platform would say the product was “not designed to suppress conflict, only to make it expensive”. Solicitors in the trial region would report a rise in what they call offline hostility, meaning arguments conducted in supermarket car parks, where the software has no jurisdiction. One firm would add a line to its engagement letter advising clients that anything said near a phone counts.

Mark Ellison, 47, whose chat opened this article, would eventually get the dog. The decision would come not from the court but from the index, which would note that his messages about the animal had been consistently warm, while his wife's had twice used the phrase “your dog”. The ruling would lift the couple to 214th. Mark would say he did not feel like a winner. “I got a badge. It says Amicable. The dog got nothing. He doesn't know we're 214th. He thinks we're fine.”