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Dossier

Dossier

Forms are the API to the court.
Lawyers hate them. We built around them, not on top of them.

02 — Shared context

What we all already know.

Consumer Bankruptcy
The operational reality
01
Consumer bankruptcy is the most form-intensive work in US law — federal forms and a thicket of district-specific local forms, with branching by chapter and by debtor type.
02
The firm around the forms — intake, CRM, deadlines, client portal, the assistant — still lives in 4–6 disconnected tools, with a paralegal re-keying data between them.
03
The operational playbook of a well-run firm — patterns, volume discipline, client-flow — isn't in the software. It lives in the people. It should live in the schema.
04
The firms filing the bulk of consumer bankruptcy — solos, 2-attorney shops, firms outside major metros — are paralegal-light and time-constrained. The product has to let one attorney run like a five-person firm, or it doesn't serve them at all.
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03 — The split in legal tech

Two paths. One is wrong.

Wide & slick · or · Deep & complex
Nobody found the middle
Wide & slick
CRM feel. No form depth.
Category-leading practice management apps look great, feel modern, run firm operations cleanly. But they don't fill court forms — firms still pay for a second tool and a paralegal to re-key data between them.
Deep & complex
Form depth. UI from 2005.
Dedicated petition-prep tools do the forms — but the form complexity bleeds straight into the UI. When forms drive the architecture, the interface inherits every conditional, every chapter branch, every district variation. Firms pay for power and accept friction.
The bet Schema in the middle. The UI is shaped by the schema, not by the forms. Forms become the schema's consumers, not its drivers. Slick UI feeding the court's API.
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04 — The architectural insight

The schema is the spine.

Architecture
Schema · Engine · Surfaces
The Schema
Schema
Forms
Court · Filings
CRM
Matter Surface
Intake
Client & Data
Assistant
AI · Schema-aware
Compliance
Rules · Validation
The architectural insight
Treat the practice area itself as the data model. Everything else is a projection of it.
Forms · CRM · Intake · Assistant · Compliance
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05 — Anatomy of a form

A form is data, not code.

Leaf form
Self-contained spec
LEAF FORM Schedule E/F PDF FIELDS BINDINGS VALIDATIONS BEHAVIOR binding: source → target SCHEMA shared vocabulary
{ field: "creditor_name", binding: creditors.unsecured[].name, behavior: { visibleIf: $.has_creditors == true }, flags: { required: true } }
Self-contained. Each field carries its own routing, conditions, and validation.
Engine is read-only. Adding a form means adding data — never amending shared code.
Expressions, not branches. 28 functions cover means-test math, totals, conditionals.
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06 — Composition

Filings resolve against case data.

Group form
Conditional tree
GROUP FORM Chapter 13 Package Petition Schedules Schedule J-2 Statement of Income condition: marital.status == 'joint' (evaluated · false here) RESOLVED CONDITIONAL · INACTIVE The engine resolves the tree at runtime. A filing is an immutable snapshot of the result.

A group form composes other forms. Children carry conditions — engine expressions evaluated against case data.

The user picks what they need; the engine resolves the tree. Joint debtor? Schedule J-2 appears. Chapter 7 instead of 13? Plan disappears.

A filing snapshots the resolved tree at submission. Immutable. The exact case state, the exact forms, the exact field values at the moment of filing. Audit trail, version history, amendment tracking come for free from the data model.

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07 — Why this is hard to copy

Architecture is destiny.

Two engines
Only one scales
The honest pattern
Engine grows per form.
Traditional form engines learn each form. New form, new revision, new district — touches code paths in shared logic. Complexity grows roughly with form count, faster when revisions cascade. This isn't a slight against anyone — it's the path that made sense before schemas were a viable abstraction. We started there too.
— Forms drive the engine.
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Engine is read-only.
The engine learned bankruptcy once. It doesn't learn each form. Forms are JSON; bindings are JSON; conditions are JSON. Adding a district means adding data, not code. The same engine ships every practice area — bankruptcy first, immigration / family / eviction / probate / workers' comp drop in as schema + form configs.
— The 1st district took about a week. The 50th will take about a week.
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08 — On AI

An amplifier, not a dependency.

Deterministic core
Optional intelligence layer
What AI accelerates
Velocity. Reach.
AI lets us digitize new forms quickly, map schema bindings at speed, and ship an in-context assistant that drafts narratives, surfaces deadlines, and runs guided walkthroughs that replace paralegal training. It's why a one-attorney firm can run like five.
What AI doesn't do
Run the platform.
The engine, the schema, the bindings, the form filling, the validations, the filings — all deterministic. All operational with AI off. We didn't build on top of an external LLM the way most legal-AI startups did. If model pricing 10×'s tomorrow, the platform still ships — fewer assistive features, same product.
Why this matters for partners Durable architecture, optional intelligence layer. The cost structure isn't hostage to a vendor we don't control. AI is how we execute fast — not what the company is built on.
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09 — What's already shipping

Not a deck. A working product.

In production today
Demo-ready
Federal+ 8 districts
Federal forms plus 3 IL · 3 GA · 2 TX. Each district carries its own local-form variants.
99IL
Forms mapped across the three Illinois districts.
92GA
Forms mapped across the three Georgia districts.
57TX
Forms mapped across the two Texas districts.
7 · 11 · 12 · 13chapters
Full branching by chapter and by individual / non-individual debtor type.
~4,000fields
Mapped, validated, cross-referenced. 28 expression functions for derived and computed fields.
Capabilities · live
✓
Full case management. Filings, contacts, threads (notes/tasks/questions), billing, calendar, audit log.
✓
White-labeled client portal plus embeddable intake widget for the firm's website.
✓
Tri-bureau credit-report import → auto-populates Schedule D and E/F. Data sources plug into the same binding system as forms.
✓
Schema-aware AI assistant. Knows what's missing, what's next, what's wrong.
✓
Three deployment postures. Cloud (multi-tenant SaaS), Vault (single-tenant private cloud), Sovereign (air-gapped on-prem).
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10 — Enough slides
Rather than more slides —
let me show you.
Client App·Portal·Live
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