John Henry · a practice platform for Texas lawyers

He raced the machine and beat it, and it killed him. This one is a hammer, and it is in your hand.

John Henry drafts, calendars, holds the file, talks to your client and records the time. What it will not do is decide anything. Every judgment arrives back at a person with a button beside it, and the record says which person pressed it and when.

It is built by a Texas trial lawyer against a live docket — a chapter 11, a collection matter, a judgment nobody can collect on — and shipped the same week it is written. Nothing on this site is a mock-up of something planned. Where a thing is not built, the page says so and names it.

Request access Start with the barrier

The board — a two-by-two of today's counts, a queue of agents working, and four rows waiting on a decision with the buttons on them — **The board — a real render, not a mock-up.** Two agents working, four decisions waiting with the buttons on them. The matter is invented.

Three things that are true of every screen

Most legal software is a filing cabinet with a chat window bolted on. This is the other thing.

Work runs through the system, not beside it

An agent working your matter is signed in, on a clock, and answerable inside the file. There is no separate report of work that happened somewhere else. If it is not in the record it did not happen, and the record is append-only.

A human decides, and the log says which one

Approving stamps your name and the time. Editing forks a new task rather than overwriting the old one. Work the system ran on its own is signed by nobody — deliberately — so what you commissioned and what it did alone can never be confused.

It says what it has not checked

Unchecked is grey, and grey is never drawn as yellow. On the day the verification pass fails to run, the work looks exactly as unverified as it is — which is the one thing a confident tool will not tell you.

What is in it

Eight surfaces, one file, and the same board your co-counsel is looking at.

The one nobody else has

The Attorney Plug In

A colleague wants to hand you a case. To decide whether you want it you have to hear about it — and hearing about it is what disqualifies you. The referring lawyer builds the file on their side of a wall; you read eight fields, none of them prose, and choose a door.

Drafting

Motion Builder and Response Builder

Build a motion from its elements, each carrying the source it rests on and the proof it needs. Then a pass grades every proposition in four colours — and grey, meaning nobody has read it, is the default and is never shown as yellow.

The file

Cases, parties, claims, rulings

Estates, matters, cases, claims, demands, appeals, judgments, rulings, intervenors — ten nouns over four tables, because a second table is where drift starts. An appeal has a parent. A judgment is a ruling that is final.

The registry

Parties are global across firms

Who EXISTS is shared; who is fighting whom is not. A name, an entity kind, a jurisdiction and a file number are public-register facts. That a party is in your case is client information and never leaves your firm.

Talking

Threads, presence, voice and video

End-to-end encrypted rooms, scoped to the people on the matter. A thread's audience is derived rather than picked, so an ex parte contact with the bench is not a rule the software follows — it is a thing the schema cannot represent.

Time

Billing that will not pad itself

Human minutes are billable. Model seconds are telemetry in a column the database refuses to let anyone sum into a bill. Categories are the 28 C.F.R. Pt. 58 App. A project set and the UTBMS codes, because one free-text category does not survive a US Trustee.

The board

Your dashboard is the dashboard

One renderer. The operator's board and yours are the same module with a different connection, so there is no private staging area where the good version lives. Every decision needing a human arrives as a row with a button on it.

Ethics

Written down, cited, and checkable

Rule 1.18 on prospective clients, 1.05 on client information, 1.04(f) on fee division, 5.04 on sharing fees, Ethics Op. 680 on cloud services, 705 and ABA 512 on billing AI. Each one is named where it bites, not gathered on a policy page.

The colour system

Red is arguing bad law. Yellow is arguable. Green is stating good law. Grey is nobody has looked.

Every proposition a draft rests on gets a card. The card carries the citation, what it is being cited FOR, and a finding — and the finding is allowed to disagree with the brief.

On the right, the drafter has graded two elements themselves — stating it and arguing it — and the authority pass has come back underneath in red on the second one. Two grades, never merged: the chip is the lawyer's own assessment and the card below is what the check found, and overwriting one with the other would erase the disagreement, which is the single most interesting thing on the screen.

The Motion Builder — a Rule 7001 check, element cards graded by the drafter, and the authority pass disagreeing underneath in red — **A real render, not a mock-up.** The matter is invented; the two findings underneath are real output from the first live run.

Here is that red card on its own. It is real output, from a motion for substantive consolidation. The proposition was written into the draft; the pass argued with it.

Against you

In re Owens Corning, 419 F.3d 195 (3d Cir. 2005)

Cited for: “the effect on each secured creditor is nil because its lien is not disturbed”
Finding: That overstates it. Owens Corning is the leading case holding that substantive consolidation CAN prejudice secured creditors even where liens survive. The motion has to confront this rather than assume past it.
Also raised, and not in the catalogue: In re S.I. Acquisition, Inc., 817 F.2d 1142 (5th Cir. 1987) — binding Fifth Circuit authority the out-of-circuit tests should be paired with.

Green · good law Yellow · arguable Red · against you Grey · not yet checked

Why there is a fourth colour

“Nobody has checked this” and “a lawyer looked and found it open” are different claims. If unchecked rendered as yellow, then on the day the pass failed to run the motion would look exactly as careful as the day it worked.

How a motion gets built →

The thing a firm structurally cannot do

A platform can hold information no lawyer at your firm has received, and still answer questions about it.

That sentence is the whole argument for the Attorney Plug In, and it is not a feature claim — it is a fact about imputation.

The paralegal who reads the file is a person whose knowledge is imputed to the firm. A screen between that person and a partner is a policy enforced by memory, and it is worth precisely what the other side's disqualification motion says it is worth.

So when a colleague wants to hand you a matter, the ordinary way to find out whether you want it is to let them tell you about it — and Tex. Disciplinary R. 1.18(c) turns on what you RECEIVED, not on what you did with it. Here the referring lawyer answers a barrier agent on their own side of the database. You read eight fields, every one an enum or a band and not one of them prose, and you choose: look, take, or pass.

46kinds of relief
across 5 forums

65legal theories,
each with its own elements

187elements, every one
carrying its source and proof

54test suites run
before anything ships

Read how the barrier is built

The part other vendors leave out

What it will not do.

This is the list a managing partner should read first. Every entry is a refusal written into the code, not a limitation being managed.

Nothing files and nothing signs.

There is no CM/ECF integration and there is no e-signature. Recording a motion as filed is a snapshot you take after you filed it yourself. A tool that files is a tool that can file the wrong thing at 4:59 on a Friday.

No case ever goes green off a model.

A model may assert a TEXT — a statute, a national rule — because you can confirm it in fifteen seconds against a free authoritative source. It may never settle what a case HELD. A case citation from a model pass tops out at arguable, and the ceiling is enforced where the card is stored rather than asked for in a prompt, because a rule a model is asked to follow is a rule it can fail to follow silently.

The sources it cannot reach are listed, switched off, by name.

The research panel names the judges' standing procedures, the docket and the full text of the decisions, and says NOT CONNECTED beside each. A panel that lists only what a tool has tells you it consulted everything it has.

It will not give you a deadline as a date.

It returns a number of days and the rule the number came from, and where two local rules answer differently it shows both, because the comparison is the warning. Rule 9006 counting, service-method additions and court holidays are not modelled, and a date printed with confidence is one a lawyer stops re-checking.

It does not read a scan.

A served pleading with no text layer is reported as probably a scan, which is not the same claim as the document being empty. The caption in a picture is a picture.

It will not take a litigation position for you.

A response has no default posture, because a default of deny would make an untouched response read as a complete denial of everything. Whether a matter is core and whether you consent to entry of a final order are left blank — that is Stern v. Marshall, and it is a position, not a recital.

It never says a case is good law.

A citation graph proves that one case cited another on a date. It cannot tell overruled from distinguished from a string cite, and anything that renders a green flag off a citation count is the failure this whole system is built against.

It bills no time you did not spend.

Model seconds are stored as telemetry in a column the schema will not allow to be summed into a billable line — a generated column that cannot reference it, with a probe that fails the build if it ever does. ABA Formal Op. 512 and Tex. Ethics Op. 705 both hold that only human time is billable; here that is unrepresentable rather than documented.