But then I had a realization: complaints are gold. They’re not just problems to fix — they’re insights waiting to be uncovered. Every complaint is a direct line to what your customers need, what your product lacks, or where your team could be stronger. Now, when complaints land in my inbox, I lean in with curiosity: What can this teach us?

Here’s how I’ve learned to flip complaints into a competitive advantage — and how you can, too.

Listen To The Bigger Problem

A lawsuit over unclear terms of service. Angry reviews about a confusing refund process. These aren’t just fires to extinguish — they’re clues to deeper issues. One lawsuit about subscription renewals pushed me to rethink how we wrote our agreements. We stripped out legalese and replaced it with plain, human language. Complaints dropped, customer satisfaction soared, and we built a foundation of trust — all because we listened.

Recurring complaints often reveal bigger, systemic problems. Addressing those root causes doesn’t just solve the immediate issue; it makes your product better for everyone.

Mine Legal Challenges For Innovation

It might sound strange, but lawsuits are some of the best feedback you’ll ever get. They’re hyper-detailed insights into where your company might be missing the mark. A privacy-related inquiry once led my team to revamp our data practices. What started as a reactive fix turned into a proactive selling point: a data-handling feature that wowed customers and exceeded compliance requirements.

Don’t shy away from legal challenges — treat them as blueprints for improvement.

Design For When Things Go Wrong

Most teams focus on the perfect customer journey: everything works, and the customer leaves happy. But complaints shine a light on what happens when things don’t go as planned.

For example, a spike in refund-related complaints had us completely overhaul our process. By simplifying the terms and communicating them more clearly, we turned a source of frustration into a moment of trust. Focusing on these “unhappy paths” prevents issues before they snowball — and builds loyalty in the process.

Complaints Are Invitations To Build Trust

Here’s the magic: when you respond to complaints with real, meaningful changes, customers notice. They don’t just see a problem fixed — they see a company that listens. After customers raised concerns about our data privacy, we launched new features that gave them more control. The result? Not just compliance, but a huge boost in customer confidence.

Handled right, complaints aren’t risks — they’re trust-builders.

The Takeaway

Complaints are gifts, not burdens. They’re a direct line to what your customers want, and they’re packed with opportunities to improve, innovate, and differentiate your brand.

For more strategies on turning challenges into opportunities, check out my book, “Product Counsel: Advise, Innovate, and Inspire.” It’s filled with actionable insights and real-world examples to help you transform complaints into competitive advantages.

How have you turned complaints into wins? Let’s swap stories — I’d love to hear yours.

Olga V. Mack is a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and a Generative AI Editor at law.MIT. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat, Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security, and Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities. She is working on three books: Visual IQ for Lawyers (ABA 2024), The Rise of Product Lawyers: An Analytical Framework to Systematically Advise Your Clients Throughout the Product Lifecycle (Globe Law and Business 2024), and Legal Operations in the Age of AI and Data (Globe Law and Business 2024). You can follow Olga on LinkedIn and Twitter @olgavmack.

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The company then pledged to do better going forward. It didn’t say how it was going to do this, since it apparently wasn’t going to address underlying issues, like branches’ willingness to outsource vehicle retrieval to law enforcement and the extremely sloppy inventory control procedures that led to employees filing theft reports for vehicles that were parked in their parking lots.

Since then, Hertz has found new ways to be awful, like charging Tesla renters fees to refill their returned rentals with gasoline. Then there’s this incident, first reported by travel site One Mile at a Time, which details the ridiculous interaction one renter had with the company when a Hertz rep tried to charge him $10,000 for driving “too many” miles with his Unlimited Miles rental.

Long story short, it would appear that someone rented a Hertz car for a month, and the rental allowed unlimited miles. The man drove 25,000 miles on the car over the course of that month, and the agency wasn’t happy about it.

Given the number of miles driven, the Hertz representative stated that he would charge the man’s credit card an extra $10,000. As the interaction goes:

Hertz representative: “You need to leave, sir.”
Customer: “But you’re going to charge this to $10,000 to my credit?”
Hertz representative: “Yes.”
Customer: “When this literally, that’s not even allowed. I never signed…”
Hertz representative: “You show me where it says I can’t charge it.”
Customer: “Right here, it literally says I won’t get charged anything, it says miles allowed, free miles, it literally says to refer to this if there’s anything extra. I’ve never signed anything saying I can only go 100 miles a day, or anything like that, or that I would have to pay more.”
Hertz representative: “But you also never signed anything saying you were going to be allowed to drive 25,000 miles in a month.”
Customer: “No, unlimited is 100,000 miles.”
Hertz representative: “No it is not.”

While 25,000 miles seems like a literally impossible number of miles to drive in 30 days, nothing in the contract stated the “unlimited miles” the customer was entitled to was actually limited in any way.

What made this worse is that the Hertz rep told the man he was going to ding his credit card for $10,000. Then he told him to leave. Understandably, the renter didn’t leave, because doing so meant he’d soon be out $10,000. When he refused to leave before this was resolved, the rep told him he was going to have him arrested.

As One Mile at a Time points out, there’s nothing in Hertz Unlimited Miles contracts that puts a limit on miles. Nor is there any clause that allows them to charge customers just because the company (or the rep handling the return) might feel the number of miles driven is excessive. Hertz is free to refuse to rent cars to customers who’ve put “too many” (whatever that means) miles on the vehicles they’ve rented, but it can’t pretend the contract says something it doesn’t just because someone has accomplished the astounding feet of racking up four months worth of mileage in a single month.

Hertz has since issued a statement about this incident. And, considering the source, it’s a pretty ok apology for an insanely ridiculous incident.

“Customer satisfaction is our top priority at Hertz, and we sincerely regret this customer’s experience at one of our franchise locations,” Hertz’s statement reads. “Per the terms of the contract, the customer will not be billed for mileage. Our franchisee is addressing the employee’s conduct and reinforcing our customer service standards and policies to ensure they are understood and followed consistently across our locations.”

Never mind. It’s not even really an apology. It simply says Hertz will not charge someone $10,000 for not violating the terms of the rental contract. That there’s some “addressing” going on at the franchisee level means this sort of thing likely won’t happen again at that particular branch, but it’s clear the company needs to do far more than react if it ever hopes to distance itself from the bad press the company and its employees seem to be intent on generating on a regular basis.

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Apple and Goldman failed to properly handle customer disputes, Rohit Chopra, the C.F.P.B.’s director, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. Even when Goldman was alerted to disputes, Mr. Chopra added, the bank often failed to follow federal requirements to investigate and resolve them in a timely manner.

The agency also said Goldman and Apple misled consumers about interest-free payment options for Apple devices, charging substantial interest despite leading customers to believe they would get interest-free financing when purchasing Apple products with their Apple Card.

“The execution was a mess,” Mr. Chopra said, referring to the launch of the credit card partnership in 2019.

You can say that again, Rohit, and at this point we don’t think Solomon would even muster an argument. You might almost say that, having no meaningful experience as a Main Street bank, Goldman was ill-equipped to try to become one. Still, there is good news in all of this for Goldman, not that there was much danger of it happening regardless.

Regulators are barring Goldman from offering any new credit card other than the Apple Card unless it provides a “credible plan” showing the product will comply with the law.

Apple and Goldman Sachs Must Pay Nearly $90 Million in Credit-Card Inquiry [NYT]

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First Republic, for instance, was famed for its personal, concierge-style service, offered to the supremely entitled and un-self-aware Silicon Valley set. It, of course, collapsed in a bank run, when those customers—who now profess themselves grateful for First Republic’s first-class customer care and take to social media to whine about how much they miss it—yanked billions from the bank.

That doomed it to an acquisition by JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank and one of its most successful. And, it appears, you don’t have to invest much in customer service to achieve those things.

Customers weren’t able to make payments with their debit and credit cards after the migration. Others reported multihour waits for customer-support agents, many of whom weren’t able to help them solve their problems.

“We were all used to legendary service and dedicated bankers,” said [tech executive Peter] Nel, who used First Republic for his personal banking needs. “Folks like me generally fly business class, stay in four- or five-star hotels, and are used to a level of service in every other aspect of our lives—except not with banking, now that First Republic is gone….”

Some deep-pocketed and longtime First Republic customers say they aren’t impressed with how Chase has handled the migration. They claim that the five-star approach at First Republic feels painfully absent, as evidenced by long waits for help over the phone and technical glitches that support agents can’t solve easily—let alone the missing umbrellas and cookies.

Well, we guess they should have considered that before joining the stampede that killed it.

They Were Used to Five-Star Service at First Republic. Now They’re Just Regular Customers. [WSJ]

In any event, the airline’s chatbot became the first line of contact for a number of passengers seeking customer service and, predictably, the chatbot hallucinated like Timothy Leary at a Pfish show.

A customer asking about bereavement fees learned that he could purchase tickets at full price and seek a refund within 90 days. When the airline refused to honor this request, he produced a screencap of the airline’s own customer service bot providing this advice only to be told that the bot was wrong and there was nothing the airline planned to do about it. A bold stance since Canada’s national motto is “Sorry.”

The customer took the airline to small claims court where the corporation decided to double down with a wild legal strategy. Per Ars Technica:

According to Air Canada, Moffatt never should have trusted the chatbot and the airline should not be liable for the chatbot’s misleading information because Air Canada essentially argued that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,” a court order said.

Yeah… no. The court awarded the customer most of the refund and some associated fees.

But what were they even talking aboot?

Based upon the record, the airline hadn’t even taken basic steps to claim that the bot belonged to some legal subsidiary. You can’t invent legal entities retroactively unless you’re trying to help corporations get away with crimes against humanity. And even then, all you can do is spin existing liability onto the new entity. As the court put it:

This is a remarkable submission. While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website. It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot.

There are actually good arguments for giving AI legal personhood. Professor David Vladeck argued a few years back that the current legal regime inefficiently allocates damages for AI run amok. There are so many points of contact where AI can go off the rails that it doesn’t make sense to blame the inventor of the algorithm if the problem is the data fed into it or the dingbats using it for the wrong purpose, for example. Making AI a separate legal entity and then creating a mandatory insurance requirement that all stakeholders have to proportionally fund is a better solution for the long-run.

But not only is that not currently the law — in Canada or anywhere else — it’s unclear how this wouldn’t be Air Canada’s fault anyway. Sure, the insurance would have to pay for the screw-up, but the carrier isn’t going to bang on OpenAI’s door when it would come time to increase premiums. This was Air Canada’s breakdown, not the algorithm’s.

Air Canada has, for now, seemingly suspended its AI endeavors.

Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot [Ars Technica]

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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They didn’t get it.

After emerging from bankruptcy protection in June, the parent company for Hertz rental cars made its trading debut on the Nasdaq on Tuesday, falling by 9.8% to $26.17 a share.

Hertz Global Holdings, trading under the ticker symbol “HTZ,” fluctuated throughout the day between $25.40 and $28 a share. It failed to reach the $29 a share offering price by certain stockholders of the company – the high end of a previously targeted range.

Seems would-be buyers had perhaps seen the reports that Hertz (allegedly) makes a practice of having customers with fully-paid up rentals arrested for stealing them.

A bankruptcy court judge was set to hear arguments Thursday regarding claims filed by dozens of Hertz customers who say they were falsely arrested — and in some cases jailed — because the company reported the cars they had rented as stolen….

[James] Tolen said officers handcuffed him, then told him he was driving a stolen car…. Tolen begged the officers to look at his rental contract, in which he says he was listed as an authorized driver. He says after seeing the document, one of the officers called Hertz and told the company it needed to get a better system….

Another claimant is Philadelphia-area contractor John Ayoub, who rented a truck from Hertz in April 2019. He said he told Hertz agents it would be a long-term rental and was told to call each week to extend it, which he says he did…. But on May 28, Hertz filed a theft report, just four days after putting through a charge of $2,300, according to court documents. And even though the $2,300 showed as paid in Ayoub's bank account the next day, Hertz didn't pull that police report back, he said.

Hmmmm. Surely Hertz will have a good explanation for this, yes?

As to pulling back police reports once payment is made or the vehicle is returned, Hertz told The Philadelphia Inquirer last year that the reports were valid when they were filed and that "it's up to law enforcement to decide what to do with the case…."

In its defense, Hertz also claimed the attorneys representing the claimants "have a track record of making baseless claims that blatantly misrepresent the facts."

Nor are those (presumably former) clients the only ones with a bone to pick with Hertz in court. There’s the small matter of its creditors, who were told (and treated as if) Hertz’s stock was worthless.

Hertz Global Holdings Inc. bondholders argued the formerly bankrupt rental-car provider shouldn’t get to shower money on shareholders without paying roughly $270 million in bond premiums and interest stemming from its chapter 11 case.

Shares of Hertz fall 9.8% on first day of Nasdaq relisting [CNBC]
Dozens of customers allege Hertz had them falsely arrested over rental cars reported stolen: "It was just terrifying" [CBS News]
Hertz Bondholders Seek More Cash Amid Stock’s Comeback [WSJ]

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Amy Vickers, who was frustrated that Robinhood prevented her from selling her shares in GameStop on Jan. 28, began the process of transferring her stocks to Fidelity Investments…. Robinhood told her the process would take five to seven days to complete, but it wasn’t until Feb. 16 that the last of her stock arrived at Fidelity. By then, her GameStop shares had lost much of their value.

“I had a lot of days laying in bed feeling depressed,” said Ms. Vickers of Austin, Texas. “Robinhood is the most unprofessional company I’ve ever dealt with managing my money.”

It's not just meme stock traders, either: Customers complain about accounts locked for more than a month, requiring dozens of e-mails (there is no phone customer support except for some options-trading users) to resolve. Although one such situated customer came up with a useful hack: After a fruitless month of back-and-forth with Robinhood, including its trademark failure to meet its own deadlines, Brenton Place started tweeting about it with an unfavorable hashtag. That got things resolved in a week, breakneck speed by Robinhood standards.

In fairness to Robinhood, it couldn’t have reasonably foreseen the surge in users and volume that accompanied the GameStop mania back in January.

“If you, overnight, have an increase of 350% of volume, there’s just not enough humans to throw at the issue to be able to deliver effective support,” Mr. Mesa said…. During the last week of January alone, Robinhood received as many customer-support tickets as it typically gets over three months, Mr. Mesa said. In response, the company reassigned a large number of engineers to work on and deploy customer-service improvements, and it largely cleared its issue backlog by the beginning of March, he added.

And, on the bright side for the company, piss-poor customer service of this sort doesn’t seem to matter for the truly important stuff, like going public.

Robinhood Has a Customer Service Problem [WSJ]

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Almost 2,000 Robinhood Markets accounts were compromised in a recent hacking spree that siphoned off customer funds, a sign that the attacks were more widespread than was previously known…. Several victims said they found no sign of criminals compromising their email accounts. And some said their brokerage accounts were accessed even though they had set up two-factor authentication…. [Client Miah Brittany] Laino said Robinhood restored her account and stock holdings, but she still plans to eventually leave the firm.

“I don’t want to sell right now,” she said. “But I’m not going to put any more money into it. I don’t really trust them.”

That may have something to do with the fact that it took Robinhood a week-and-a-half to get back to Laino when she e-mailed customer support. And she’s one of the lucky ones: Another twentysomething Robinhood trader interviewed by Bloomberg is still waiting to hear back. And that may have something to do with the fact that Robinhood apparently thought itself far too technologically advanced to bother with something so 20th century as a phone number.

The attacks unleashed a torrent of complaints on social media, where investors recounted futile attempts to call the brokerage, which doesn’t have a customer service phone number. Robinhood, which has more than 13 million customer accounts, is now considering whether to add a phone number along with other tools, the person said.

We can’t wait for the quantum cyber criminals to show up.

Robinhood Internal Probe Finds Hackers Hit Almost 2,000 Accounts [Bloomberg]

First things first, keep your customers calm:

Capital One Financial Corporation announced today that on July 19, 2019, it determined there was unauthorized access by an outside individual who obtained certain types of personal information relating to people who had applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers.

Capital One immediately fixed the configuration vulnerability that this individual exploited and promptly began working with federal law enforcement. The FBI has arrested the person responsible. Based on our analysis to date, we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual. However, we will continue to investigate.

That's a strong start. Play down the whole thing, let everyone catch their breath...

Based on our analysis to date, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada.

Importantly, no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised and over 99 percent of Social Security numbers were not compromised.

Now you're cooking with gas! This hacker doesn't have account numbers or logins and "Like, only 1% of you should even care" is a very strong message. Basically, this hack ain't shit!

The largest category of information accessed was information on consumers and small businesses as of the time they applied for one of our credit card products from 2005 through early 2019. This information included personal information Capital One routinely collects at the time it receives credit card applications, including names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.

Oh, that's...not great...

Beyond the credit card application data, the individual also obtained portions of credit card customer data, including:

• Customer status data, e.g., credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, contact information

• Fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018

Wait, holy shit, Capital One, that's bad. At least it's only 1%. What's that, like a couple hundred accounts?

No bank account numbers or Social Security numbers were compromised, other than:

• About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers

• About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers

Umm, this isn't working, Capital One. 

Well, not this:

We apologize to our customers who may be experiencing an issue with our online banking and mobile app. Thanks for your patience while we research this issue. If you are impacted, please check back here for updates.

— Ask Wells Fargo (@Ask_WellsFargo) February 7, 2019

And if you do end up doing this, you likely shouldn't explain it thusly:

We’re experiencing system issues due to a power shutdown at one of our facilities, initiated after smoke was detected following routine maintenance. We’re working to restore services as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

— Wells Fargo (@WellsFargo) February 7, 2019

[please read the responses, they are glorious.]

And while every bank has a tech snafu now and then, Wells Fargo stopped being just another bank awhile ago, so when it looks dead, the market is more liable to start kicking it:

Our advice remains the same Wells Fargo...He's out there.