What we are trying to do

We exist to improve access to justice by making routine legal services as cheap as we durably can. Most lawyers charge several thousand dollars for a transactional matter — an estate plan, an LLC formed to hold investments, a year of flat-fee general counsel for an emerging-tech company. We want to price the same engagement in the tens or low hundreds of dollars and serve many more people with the gap.

We get there by automating every part of the engagement that can be automated, and keeping a licensed attorney in (or around) the loop for the parts that genuinely need human legal judgment.

Two organizations, one mission

This codebase is shared by two distinct organizations:

• Neon Law is the law firm. Licensed attorneys here render legal advice for compensation in three practice areas, chosen because they are transactional and not adversarial:

  • Estate planning — wills, revocable trusts, and the ancillary documents that travel with them.
  • Investment LLCs — LLCs formed to hold real estate, securities, or other operating businesses.
  • Emerging-technology general counsel — flat-fee monthly contracts for startup formation, equity, customer agreements, and the day-to-day paperwork that founders need.

  The firm does not take litigation matters. Adversarial work is not the low-hanging fruit of automation; transactional work is.

• Neon Law Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The Foundation publishes this codebase under an open-source license, funds its development through donations and grants, and runs continuing legal education (CLE) for attorneys who want to use these workflows in their own practices. The Foundation's work product is a public good.

The firm pays the Foundation to maintain the open-source surface; the Foundation makes the workflow library available to every other attorney who needs it. Legal advice still has to come from a licensed attorney with a duty to a client — the software just removes the parts of the job that don't require a JD.

Why Rust

Legal work is durable. A trust signed today might sit in a safe for forty years before anyone reads it. An LLC operating agreement might survive multiple ownership changes. A workflow that quietly produces a wrong answer in three months is worse than no workflow at all.

We chose Rust because:

• Type-safe workflows. Every step in the retainer-intake state machine — and every step we add — has a compiler-checked input and output type. Whole categories of "I forgot to handle that case" bugs cannot ship.
• unsafe_code = "forbid". The workspace forbids unsafe code at the crate boundary, so the runtime is as inspectable as we can make it.
• Speed. Rendering a notation, walking a questionnaire, and appending a durable workflow event all happen in milliseconds. That matters because we want to serve the thousandth client as cheaply as the first.
• One binary, two environments. The same Rust code runs in local development (KIND) and in production (GKE Autopilot), so there is no "but it worked on staging" failure mode between the laptop and the live deploy.

What you actually pay the firm for

When a client engages Neon Law for one of these workflows, the fee is not "I clicked through a wizard." The fee is for three things the wizard cannot provide:

1. Human legal judgment in (or around) the loop. A licensed attorney reviews the client's answers, owns the legal conclusion, and signs the work product. AI and the workflow runtime are load-bearing scaffolding; the lawyer is load-bearing on the legal advice.
2. Accountability. Because the work product comes from a licensed attorney, the client can hold the firm liable if the advice turns out to be wrong. That accountability — that legal insurance — is what makes the engagement legal advice rather than a tool tutorial. We optimize the workflows to make the advice both correct and cheap; the firm absorbs the cost of being wrong.
3. Transparency. The software the firm uses is published by the Foundation under an open-source license. Any client, and any other attorney, can read the rule library, the question registry, the workflow definitions, and the rendered template. When we make a mistake, the mistake is inspectable — not buried inside a proprietary SaaS.

What we will not do

• We will not take litigation matters through these workflows. Adversarial work is not the low-hanging fruit.
• We will not market the software as a replacement for a lawyer. The lawyer is the load-bearing piece; the software is the cost-reduction piece.
• We will not lock the legal-workflow library behind a proprietary license. Every workflow the firm ships also lands in the Foundation's open-source repository.

Where this page is wired up

• This file lives at the workspace root as mission.md and is the canonical mission statement.
• The web binary renders it at /foundation/mission under the Neon Law Foundation brand. The route reads this same file at compile time via include_str!, so there is no duplicate copy to drift.
• Every contributor should read this page before proposing changes to the product surface. If a proposed change cannot be justified against this mission, the proposal is wrong, not the mission.