api.lawyer
Early access

DOCUMENTATION

The demand side of legal work, documented.

api.lawyer is the demand-side substrate: Tenants and Mints open Matters, a deterministic agent works the open stages, and every act the Reserved-Act Catalog names lands on a Signer via gigs.lawyer. These pages document the whole loop.

Propose → gate → commit

Workers — the agent and the Signer alike — are judgment-only: they propose. The Gate alone commits, and its authority is bounded twice. Tenant Guardrails bind mechanics only (fee caps, jurisdiction allowlists); Client Mandates alone bind the merits. And two answers are sovereign against the Gate itself: a Declination is final until the Client speaks, and a journaled Client direction cannot be blocked on Tenant-sourced grounds.

agent proposesGate checksjournal commits

Matter and Asset

The Matter is one Client’s one legal objective, advanced through six Stage Verbs — intake, prepare, examine, review, sign, file — to one of four forever-terminals. The Asset is the perpetual noun the Matter acts on: it keeps the docket, an insert-only status history, the Deadline Ladder, and a lineage of every Matter that ever touched it. Matters terminate; Assets accumulate.

intakeprepareexaminereviewsignfile

Two membranes

Everything on this surface is sorted by two lines. The authority membrane: acts in the Reserved-Act Catalog — sign, file, and advice-class utterances — are performed only by a Signer under their own license; no model quality crosses that line. The money membrane: the two-rail Settlement decides who invoices what — on the patent rail the platform is provider and pays the flat Legal Fee to the Signer; on the state rail the Signer is merchant of record for the Legal Fee and the platform invoices only its Product Fee. The Legal Fee is never split, never shared, never scaled.

The two-rail Settlement

patent rail
Sperry-sheltered USPTO patent practice. The platform is provider and merchant of record: it charges the Customer a flat Product Fee and pays the Signer the flat per-act Legal Fee. The Meter releases only on the USPTO receipt — no filing, no charge.
state rail
All attorney-only work. The Signer is merchant of record for the Legal Fee, charged directly to the Client and recorded here — structurally never platform revenue. The platform separately invoices its flat Product Fee.
perActInsuranceUsd
The per-act Umbrella E&O line, a named platform cost on every attested reserved act — on both rails.

POC surface — in-memory stores, deterministic clock, no live filings. Nothing here is legal advice.