The constraint is the interesting part

The constraint

Every competing product asks the firm to hand over its CM/ECF credentials. For a solo attorney, giving a new vendor the keys to file on their behalf is a professional-liability question, not a software question. The product had to be useful without ever holding a credential — which ruled out the entire category of automated filing.

The decision

Run every deterministic check in the browser, so the document never leaves the machine. OCR and identifier scanning became an opt-in server job with an explicit retention choice, and the output never claims a redaction is confirmed — it flags a possible identifier and makes a human confirm it. Court-specific rules ship as versioned rule packs keyed to court and date, so a rule change is a data update rather than a deploy.

The constraint

Contractors will not upload a billing workbook containing job costs, margins, and subcontractor pricing to a stranger's server to try out a tool. The trust barrier came before the value could be demonstrated, which meant the usual free-trial-behind-a-signup pattern was dead on arrival.

The decision

The entire check runs client-side. No account, no upload, no server round trip — the workbook is parsed in the browser and the findings render locally. That single decision removed the objection that was killing the funnel, and it made the privacy claim structurally true rather than a policy promise. A sample workbook with planted errors lets a skeptical visitor see the output before touching their own numbers.

The constraint

Scores get entered on a phone at the turn, where the course has no signal. An architecture that assumed connectivity would fail in exactly the moment the product exists to serve — and a league that loses a card once never trusts the software again.

The decision

Offline-first, with a revision-aware score outbox in IndexedDB and a transactional sync RPC that resolves conflicts deterministically rather than last-write-wins. Finalized scores are immutable at the database level and every change lands in an audit log, because the thing a commissioner actually needs is to be able to prove what happened when two players disagree in the parking lot.

The constraint

The valuable signal is the delta between two publications, but the state publishes only the current snapshot and overwrites it. Worse, an inference like 'this building's contract may be in play' is commercially useful and legally dangerous — a certificate entry does not establish that equipment is unsafe or that anyone is out of compliance.

The decision

Preserve every source snapshot on retrieval so change detection has something to compare against, and make the claims policy a structural part of the product rather than a footer. Every delivered row carries its source link, retrieval date, and a field-level confidence rating, and the language is constrained at the data layer: 'state-reported certificate event' and 'likely operator', never 'non-compliant'. Human review sits between extraction and delivery.