Reserved legal acts, callable.
The caller is an agent or a business system, so this deck opens the way an agent would read it: capabilities, protocol, rates, budget. The story comes later, for the humans.
An agent runs a workflow until it hits a step a statute reserves for a licensed human. api.lawyer makes that step a call. The path is A2H2A — calling agent → this rail → a licensed human at the gigs.lawyer supply door, inside the same legal entity → back to the calling agent. The human hop is not a review step bolted on for comfort; it is a required supplier, because the statute names a person.
| Verb | The contract |
|---|---|
review | a contract or document reviewed by a licensed human, returning findings the caller’s workflow can act on |
advise | a legal opinion on a stated question, in a named jurisdiction, from a practitioner credentialed in it |
draft | an instrument that requires a licensed hand — prepared, or revised from the caller’s draft |
file | a filing that requires a practitioner of record, submitted by one |
sign | a certification where a statute or counterparty requires a licensed signature |
Every verb crosses the human hop, so completion is human-scale, not request-scale: a call opens a matter, returns a typed pending state immediately, and delivers the completed act by callback — the honest contract for an act a person performs.
median turnaround–·–posts when first ninety days of measured completions resolves — the designed turnaround class is hours to days, set per verb, not milliseconds; the envelope is measured, then published, never asserted in advance.
The verb set and each verb’s jurisdictional boundary are drafted, not settled. Which acts are reserved varies by jurisdiction; the shipped taxonomy is set with counsel, not by this deck.
The caller gets three things: a capability contract, a posted rate card, and a conformance posture it can verify. No sales conversation, no engagement letter to broker, no becoming a law firm. The rail is designed so that building on it is how an agent avoids practicing law — the type system is built to stop it at the reserved boundary, with that boundary drawn by the counsel-settled taxonomy above.
The shape of the card: per-act, posted, uniform.
rate card–·–posts when stack#1 §A5 resolves — the shape is fixed; the figures post when the gate resolves. No dollar amounts appear before then.
One card for everyone, so an agent can price a workflow before it runs — no sales conversation, no negotiated tier, no quote to wait on.
Budget and principal. Every calling agent acts for a principal — the business that authorizes spend and is, in legal terms, the client. Budgets fail closed: a call that would exceed its cap is refused before the act begins, never discovered on an invoice. Authority is scoped: an agent’s mandate names which verbs it may invoke and to what limit. And acceptance is not automatic — a matter opens subject to a conflict check, and the licensed human can decline. That independence is the caller’s regulatory safety, not fine print.
Whose lawyer, whose risk. Every matter has a named client — the caller’s principal — so privilege sits where it always has: between that client and the licensed practitioner of record.
The anatomy of the cost of one reserved call: remittance to the licensed human who performs the act, then the rail’s take.
The margin of the cell — the single legal entity that holds this rail and its gigs.lawyer supply door — is a take rate on the flow, not software margin, and no model improvement changes that: the statute names a person.
Everywhere else in the estate — the portfolio of rails this studio operates — functions migrate Human → Agentic → Generative → Code, and each migration is structural margin expansion. Here the migration runs until it hits the reserved acts and stops. The floor caps the margin — and the same floor is what a competitor cannot code their way past.
Primary motion is B2A2B — a business system or its agent calls the rail, because every api.* rail sells to a machine acting for a business. Secondary is B2H2A, where a human authoriser deploys agent work that includes the legal step. Fulfilment is always A2H2A: the H is not a user persona but a required supplier.
Being discoverable and callable by an agent is the distribution channel — the way SEO and a sales team were the channel for SaaS. That is what the namespace position and AXP conformance are for.
We have already run the experiment that proves the failure mode. At Rocket Auto, what ran unstaffed was sales, BDC and desking. The dealer licence, titling, DMV processing and F&I compliance were never unstaffed — those are statutory-person functions, and the humans holding them were Rocket’s, not ours. When that relationship ended, an otherwise-working business ended with it.
rocketauto.com now redirects to a corporate index page.
Borrowed regulated supply is the single point of failure, and we do not borrow it twice.
One cell, two doors: demand rail — api.lawyer · supply door — gigs.lawyer · one entity — https://schema.org.ai/Organization/legal-cell.
api.lawyer and gigs.lawyer are therefore two segments of one path inside one legal entity: the demand rail is the interface, the supply door is the human implementation of the same function, and neither is a counterparty to the other. They are two audiences — the calling agent here, the licensed practitioner there — which is why each has its own deck, and this one sells only to the caller.
The reserved boundary is not fought; it is compiled. Two anchors, one posted and one pending:
Sperry v. Florida, 373 U.S. 379 (1963), unanimous: federal authorization to practice before the USPTO preempts state UPL rules. Patent practice is legal work, a licence is absolutely required — and the sovereign issuing it is the United States. The patent corridor this rail launches in stands on sixty-three years of settled law, not on a loophole.
Arizona’s ABS program is live and public. It permits non-lawyer OWNERSHIP of a law firm. It does not permit AI to practice law, and this rail does not claim otherwise: licensed humans practice, with real refusal rights the platform cannot override.
The operating entity is designed, not formed. Until formation and licensure close, everything above is a designed contract, not a live service — and this deck says so on purpose.
What happens next, in order. The pending gates in this deck are a sequence, not a pile: entity formation and licensure → matter taxonomy settled with counsel, patent corridor first → the rate card posts → the api.qa conformance run → the first settled machine payment. The sequence stands at its first gate today — entity formation and licensure is the gate in front of everything else. The patent corridor launches behind the first two gates; everything downstream is mechanical once the entity exists.
Request a key — patent is first. Keys are requested at api.lawyer, and a key held before launch is queued for the patent corridor and sees the rate card the day it posts. Or start with the capability contract — the verb table at the top of this deck is its summary, and the full contract publishes at api.lawyer as the gates close.