Friend —

Years ago my family was the plaintiff in a commercial lawsuit. The case was real, the wrong done to us was real, and we had to walk away — because we could no longer afford to keep paying the lawyers.

That moment is the reason Lawma exists. It taught me something a law school classroom doesn't: in practice, justice is something you can only have if you can pay for it. We had the right of the matter. We just couldn't afford the right to be heard.

When I later trained as a lawyer, I saw the other half of the same broken market. The economics don't work for the people who need counsel. They don't work for the attorneys either — about 1 in 4 new law graduates take jobs where a bar license isn't required.

So I went and shipped what I could. I directed Tyler Technologies' Guide & File — the guided-interview system that walks self-represented people through court forms — across 15 states and 26 court jurisdictions. During my tenure the system helped more than 160,000 litigants prepare their filings. Most on a phone. Most with nowhere else to turn.

Before I shipped, I spent a year and a half studying every access-to-justice program worth learning from. I interviewed every self-represented-litigant program in the United States and Canada, sat with court self-help staff and legal-aid attorneys across the continent, and evaluated the models running abroad. On the ground I worked alongside more than 200 court self-help offices, access-to-justice commissions, pro-bono lawyers, legal-aid attorneys, and bar associations — and with dozens of judges and justices as we redesigned how their courts serve people without lawyers. I chaired an OASIS committee setting the data standards these systems would need to talk to each other, launched a self-represented-litigant integration standardization initiative in the U.S. courts, and helped author an access-to-justice technology reference framework with IAALS at the University of Denver.

At Tyler I also led the team of consultants who produced this work. That meant running the legal-content operation itself: managing the writers who built the guided interviews, working directly with lawyer offices to develop the underlying legal content, policies, and processes, and partnering with the federal Legal Services Corporation's Technology Initiative Grant program — the U.S. government's grant channel for civil-legal-aid technology — to fund legal-aid organizations to author and innovate on the platform.

I was close enough to product strategy to know the full software-development lifecycle for this exact category — including the hard parts: integrating with the state court case-management systems and the e-filing systems that actually decide whether a filing lands. That is why Lawma is built to do something no consumer legal tool has done: pull bidirectional data from the courts themselves back into a public-data AI library our clients can actually use.

None of that is what you learn in a deck. I watched — up close, first-hand — hundreds of self-represented litigants walk into a courthouse alone. I saw which prompts stopped them mid-answer, which screens they misread, which words we chose that scared them off the record. I learned what the form-shop platforms get wrong: they push court forms blind to the state-to- court-to-judge nuance that actually decides whether a filing works.

I've also spent the last 15 years in tech — at large public-company environments including SAP, BlackLine, and Coupa — where I learned how to harness software's power for unrepresented litigants to get a fair shake. Multi-tenant architecture, privileged-data security, audit discipline at enterprise scale: I understand the muscles legal-tech needs and how to build them.

The technology is finally stable and safe enough to put in front of people who can't afford a mistake.

Welcome to Lawma.