# Parkbench

> Parkbench is a network of legal-software "benches": tools that make institutional
> paperwork legible for the person who didn't write it, and that stop exactly where a
> licensed human should begin. Parkbench is software, not a law firm. Nothing it or its
> products produce is legal advice, an outcome prediction, or an eligibility verdict.

## Doctrine (the Two Laws)

1. Money may change who can do more with a tool; it may never change what the tool
   tells you. Free and paying users get the same truth about the same document.
2. Intelligence flows toward the weaker party — the person holding a document they
   didn't write.

## Working benches (deployed previews)

- [Countersign](https://countersign-nile-hs-projects.vercel.app): Attorney-countersign
  drafting bench for consumer-law firms and legal aid. The tool drafts; a human with a
  license signs. Four release walls. Free for the consumer, always. Licensing is flat,
  per-seat, or per-released-matter — never a share of a legal fee.
- [Caseload](https://caseload-nile-hs-projects.vercel.app): Credential-gated triage
  bench for legal intake. No attested credential, no output at all. Leash table of
  covered areas; 46 machine-checked assertions.
- [Recoup](https://recoup-nile-hs-projects.vercel.app): Bill-audit and recovery bench.
  Integer-cent arithmetic, asserted-vs-confirmed findings, declared detector gaps.
  Consumer-first; firms license flat.
- [Threshold](https://threshold-nile-hs-projects.vercel.app): Benefit-program rule
  surfacer. Names programs, paperwork, and the deciding office with cited, dated rules.
  Never issues an eligibility verdict. 65 machine-checked assertions.

## Engineering invariants (all benches)

- Verbatim-or-absent grounding: document quotes ship only as exact substrings of the
  user's document; failed citations are dropped, not fuzzed.
- Schema-enforced honesty fields via forced-tool structured JSON; the field
  recommendedNextStep is banned family-wide, replaced by neutral howToChoose.
- Zero-secrets deterministic mock engines mirror the live contract for testing.
- Two-key go-live: an API key alone serves labeled samples; production additionally
  requires a no-training/no-retention confirmation flag.
- Legal rules are cited, dated data files — never model memory.
- Documents are processed in memory and not retained.

## Benches in the workshop (professional buyers, unlaunched)

- Letters: Estate-settlement drafting and deadline tracking for California formal
  probate, built for probate attorneys and their paralegals. The system never contacts
  institutions, courts, heirs, or any third party. Statutory rules under review.
- Afterword Probate: Court-ready estate inventories and probate schedules, generated
  from a guided asset intake. All 51 US jurisdictions encoded as validated data,
  pending cross-check; assets needing professional appraisal are never given an
  invented value.

## Wider family (in the workshop, unlaunched)

Plainsight, Marque, ServiceRecord, Crossing, Kindred, Recourse, Recourse for Business,
Foresight, Advocate, Abate, Reassess, NoticeKey, Throughline, Afterward, and the
Benefit Channel distribution layer — document decoders built to the same contract, one
per kind of paper an institution can send. Architecture: Pandect (cited, attested rules
registry) → grounding rails (the decoders) → Nexus (professional-only computation).

## Contact

paintedalways@gmail.com