The burden
yields.
From the Latin cedere, to yield. Administrative burden yields to automation. The automation yields to the attorney's judgment. That balance is the whole product.
Solo and small-firm attorneys carry an entire practice on their own shoulders. We build the assistant that takes the first pass on the administrative half, so their attention goes to judgment, strategy and advocacy.
A solo family law attorney does not simply practice law. They manage deadlines, fill out court forms, triage an inbox, track billing, chase missing documents and coordinate filings, all while representing people going through one of the hardest periods of their lives.
We started with California family law and the Bay Area because jurisdiction specificity is the thing generic tools get wrong. A general model does not know that Santa Clara and Alameda keep different court holidays, or that CCP § 1005 counts court days rather than calendar days. That knowledge is in the product from the first line rather than bolted on.
My wife runs a family law practice. She signed a new divorce client on a Tuesday. By Thursday morning the client had reason to believe her husband was about to empty the accounts, and everything she could lay hands on - four hundred-odd statements, letters and screenshots - arrived over the next day.
Three people spent the better part of two days reading it to produce one list: every account, every institution, in time to act on Friday. They made it. But the work was reading, not lawyering - and a typical family matter carries five hundred emails and four hundred documents behind it, each one a fact that moved, a task, or a date somebody has to notice.
I build software platforms. I built the first version of this for her. The first thing she asked for was that it treat what it found as true, and that was the one thing I would not build.
Two practising California family law attorneys advise the product. One of them is my wife, and her firm runs Cedent on live matters. The longer version of the story.
Five positions we build from.
Not values on a wall. Each one decided something about how the product works, and most of them can be checked on another page of this site.
AI should yield to attorney judgment.
Jurisdiction specificity is not negotiable.
Every fact needs a source.
Work alongside existing tools, not against them.
The best tool is the one that disappears.
California family law is the beginning.
Deep in one jurisdiction first, then outward. Breadth before depth produces a tool nobody can rely on.
Be part of what we are building.
We are taking on Bay Area family law practices first, and a demo is where we ask what your own would need. Twenty minutes, on our demonstration firm, with a product expert on the call.