We open law and government to the people they govern.

We build software for the institutions that serve the public.

Why we build

What we are aiming for

A person should be able to find out what the law says about their situation and what they can do about it. A person should be able to get what a government agency owes them without losing weeks to forms and waiting. A community should be able to write its own rules through a process its members can follow and check.

AI makes all three possible for the first time. We are building the software that gets us there.

The product

Intake for legal aid

The law decides whether a family keeps its home or its wages, and most people who face it cannot afford a lawyer. Legal-aid offices exist to help, and for lack of resources they turn away about half of the requests they receive.

A person tells their story in their own words, and an AI assistant gathers the facts as they talk. Eligibility is screened by the office’s written rules, and every result can be traced to the rules that produced it. The assistant gives legal information, never legal advice; a licensed attorney decides whether to take the case.

Intake demo: conversation on the left; facts gathered so far on the right. — The intake conversation, with the facts gathered so far beside it.

Office handoff: story, facts, screening result, and each rule applied; a licensed attorney decides whether to take the case. — The file the attorney reads, with each rule that produced the result.

We have a working prototype and are looking for one or two design partners to run it on real intake, starting in Washington, DC. If that could be your office, 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 the law within everyone’s reach.