Why I Open-Sourced DepoAudio (and What Free Tools Do for Court Reporting)
The story behind giving the court-audio converter away — why some legal-tech plumbing should just be free, and what that does for trust in a vendor-locked field.
find ~/blog --format short
Short notes
Compact field notes, updates, and focused arguments that get to the point without pretending to be a reference guide.
This is an experimental reading lane. The full Log remains the canonical mixed chronology.
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An AI Reliability Checklist for Law Firms (One Page — Print It)
A printable checklist for legal AI reliability — model portability, data control, human-in-the-loop, and fallbacks. The one-pager an office manager can actually pin up.
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Building DepoStack in Public: What Court Reporting Software Should Be
A build-log on the principles behind DepoStack — vendor-neutral, on-device, professional-first. What's broken in legacy court reporting software, and what I'm doing differently.
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Page:Line or It Didn't Happen: Making AI Cite the Record
A dangerous legal-AI failure is confident, uncited fabrication. Here is how to require page:line support in a prompt and review the result.
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Why Legal AI Should Run on Your Machine, Not Someone Else's Cloud
Sensitive testimony shouldn't be uploaded to a vendor just to be useful. The case for on-device legal AI — privacy, continuity, and cost — and where the line actually is.
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The frontier comes back online
After the June suspension, Fable 5 is back. What the interruption looked like from the seat of someone who builds on these tools — and what it taught me about wiring a stack to a single model.
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Love loudly — then make it legal
A Pride shout-out to my friends at Life Plan Law here in St. Pete, and why the paperwork — wills, directives, powers of attorney — is one of the most underrated forms of love there is.
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What Happens to Legal AI Tools When the Government Pulls the Plug?
A continuity checklist for legal teams that depend on hosted AI models: portability, human review, data control, and a tested fallback.
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What Happens When the Person Who Runs the Court Reporting Tech Also Builds the Tools
I run technology at a court reporting firm founded in 1981 and build tools for the same field—what that changes about legal tech, AI, and the record.
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When the frontier gets recalled
Anthropic said a US directive suspended Fable 5 and Mythos 5. A June 2026 snapshot of what that meant for people building on hosted models.
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Stop prompting like you're Googling
CasePrompts is in preview: free, copy-ready AI prompts for litigation, built on the CITE method — with citation discipline baked in.
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Hello, world
The Log opens — what this blog is, what to expect, and why it looks like a terminal.
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DepoAudio: getting court audio out of jail
Why I built a free, open-source desktop app that converts supported court audio locally, with experimental FTR/TRM handling.