The systems that govern people should be legible to the people they govern.

The problem

The rules that govern people are closed to the people they govern

The law decides whether a family keeps its home or its wages, and most people who face it cannot afford a lawyer. The organizations built to help — legal aid — must turn away roughly half of the requests they receive, for lack of resources. Government works the same way: what the state owes you sits behind forms, jargon, and waiting rooms built as if your time were worth nothing.

That scarcity is no longer necessary. The cost of competent legal and civic help is collapsing; what keeps these systems closed is inertia. We exist to open them — and, in time, to extend the same work to how communities write their rules together.

Where we start

An intake and triage assistant for legal aid

Legal-aid intake is where a person meets the legal system, and where most are turned away. Our first product meets the person at the door, gathers their situation in plain conversation, screens eligibility, and hands the attorney a structured, complete file.

It is built for the trust this domain demands:

• Eligibility and routing decisions come from deterministic, auditable rules the organization controls — never from a model's judgment.
• The assistant provides legal information only, never legal advice. Attorneys make every representation decision.
• The person seeking help never pays.

We have a working prototype and are looking for one or two design-partner organizations to shape it around real intake, starting in Washington, DC. If that could be your organization, write to us.

Who is building this

Jacob Jove is a Georgetown Law student and a former software engineer. Before law school, he built software at Indeed and spent a year evaluating and training the outputs of AI language models; earlier, he co-founded a software consultancy and a civic-education nonprofit. He is building Lychnos to put both halves of that background to work on the same problem.