We help in-house counsel make the calls their business needs, faster, for far less.
We are a law firm that works with you to make the best legal decisions for your business: multi-jurisdiction surveys, go/no-go reads, compliance, detailed research, decision trees, training, and insight into the legal environment you operate in. To do it, we pair custom AI systems with experienced counsel, cutting the time and cost of the research and analysis behind those questions. Your time goes to the judgment and the decision. And the work stays living: when the law moves, your deliverables can be updated in a fraction of the time and cost.
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Built on the premise that AI cannot be trusted.
- The body of law behind your question, built from high-quality sources.
- Reviewed and challenged by multiple independent systems before anything advances.
- Everything is captured, stress-tested, and cross-checked, and it comes with an audit trail, so you can see what it did.
Days, not weeks
A multi-jurisdiction survey while the decision is still live.
Decisions, not memos
Grounded analysis to make the call, and to know when you need more.
Fewer hours, lower spend
A fixed price to build the legal knowledge base your work needs, then hourly for the deliverables, on far fewer hours, so the total comes down.
What decision support means here.
More than legal research. What comes back from a traditional firm is often slow and still not what the decision needed: a description of the law, weeks later, when what you asked for was to understand the risk. We aim at the decision instead, bringing together the authorities that govern, the practical picture of how they actually operate on the ground, and close analysis of the decisions that matter, mixed to your question. Often 80–90% of the answer, quickly, is exactly what the decision requires.
Faster, and for a lower total spend.
A traditional firm bundles production and judgment into one hourly bill, then re-bills it each time you come back. We split them. Production (the research, the drafting, the jurisdictional scanning) is compressed into a scoped, fixed fee for the knowledge base your work runs on, quoted before you commit. The deliverables are then billed hourly, but on far fewer hours, because the production is already done.
Our rates are what you would expect from experienced counsel. What the knowledge base removes is the hours, not the judgment, and that is what brings the total down. The base is yours: you own it, and you can take it with you.
Grounded in the sources. Stress-tested before it reaches you.
The firm is built around AI, and this is what that means in practice. Every engagement starts by building the body of law that governs your questions, gathered from official sources rather than the AI's memory. The analysis is produced from it, then reviewed and challenged by multiple independent systems before it reaches you. A conclusion has to survive disagreement between models from different vendors, and the work is stress-tested for controlling authority it hasn't seen, because the hardest error to catch is the one that isn't on the page.
A memo ages the day it's delivered. What we build doesn't have to. The base is maintained, so the work resting on it stays current.
Two decades building law at scale. This firm is the next stage.
For two decades at Microsoft, David Rudin built systems that let a small legal team answer an enormous volume of questions without slowing the business down, taking open source legal review from a few dozen requests a month to hundreds of thousands. He founded the Joint Development Foundation, which compressed consortium launches from months to days and now hosts thirty-six projects as part of the Linux Foundation. foundational.law is the next system in that line, and the through-line is the same one it has always been: get the knowledge right once, and the answers come fast enough to be useful.
The questions we're built for.
The work that suits this firm is broad, research-heavy, and decision-oriented: the answer is spread across many sources and many jurisdictions, and what you need at the end is the knowledge to make the call.
One question across many markets on a single framework, covering what each rule says and how it's applied, in days not weeks.
The long tail your team fields all year, built once and kept live instead of re-researched at full cost each time.
Whether it clears, exactly where it doesn't, and what would change the answer, before you tell the business yes or no.
Your obligations mapped to how the business actually operates: what applies, what it requires, and where the gaps are.
The regulatory, policy, and competitive picture across a domain, assembled from primary sources and kept current.
A position you already hold, pressure-tested against the authorities before it goes to the business or the board.
Test us on a question you've already had answered.
The fastest way to judge a new approach is against work you can already compare. Bring a question you've already paid outside counsel to answer.
Step 01 · The question
You bring the question
Something you've already had answered, so you have a real comparison, with a fixed fee before anything starts.
Step 02 · The work
We produce our own analysis
We build the base and produce our own analysis, every conclusion traced to an authority you can read.
Step 03 · The comparison
Compare it against the original analysis
Read the two side by side, then decide whether it warrants more of your work.
Contact us.
We work best with in-house teams carrying more decisions than their headcount supports, who want analysis priced to scope rather than to time.
You work with senior counsel directly. Two decades building systems to answer legal questions at scale, including at Microsoft. About the firm