Field Notes from a LegalTech Company

The Appalanche Field Notes.

Essays on evidence integrity, AI safety in law, patent strategy, and the gap between consumers and counsel — from the team building the platform.

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Why nearby camera evidence disappears in 72 hours — and what to do about it.

Most retail and traffic camera systems overwrite footage within 24-72 hours. By the time a personal injury claim is filed, the most valuable evidence has already been written over. Here's what we learned building automated retrieval into IncidentApp.

Recent

The latest from our desk.

Why nearby camera evidence disappears in 72 hours.

The forensic crisis nobody talks about — and the engineering response we've been building.

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The "no client-facing legal advice" line, and why it's load-bearing.

How we drew the boundary between augmenting attorney judgment and crossing into UPL territory — and why getting this wrong kills the company.

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14 patent filings before a single dollar of revenue.

Most early-stage founders skip patents. We did the opposite — and here's the framework we used to decide what to file, when, and why.

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Designing for impaired cognition.

What we changed in IncidentApp's UX after watching real users try to navigate the app under the cognitive load of an actual crash.

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The $53B market that nobody owns.

Why personal injury and auto claim adjudication is structurally underserved by software — and what an opinionated platform looks like.

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PHI in, PHI never out: a tokenization architecture.

How we architected the PHI-Tokenizer + PHI-Proxy stack so AI models can reason about medical context without ever seeing protected information in the clear.

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SHA-256 at the camera: integrity sealing on iOS.

Notes from implementing cryptographic sealing at the moment of capture, including the platform constraints that kept us up at night.

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The case for free forever (and the unit economics behind it).

Why IncidentApp is free for consumers — and how the B2B SaaS engine on the other side makes the math work.

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SB 37 and the future of attorney-AI in California.

What California's most ambitious AI-in-law bill means for technology vendors — and the design choices that survive contact with regulation.

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