Family law, Article 10.

An Article 10 case in New York Family Court arrives with a petition, ACS records, prior court filings, school and medical records, and often a procedural history that goes back years across multiple judges. The attorney for the child or the respondent parent receives the file with a hearing date that is often days, not weeks, away.

The work that has to happen before the hearing is mostly reading. Reading the procedural posture, reading the allegations, reading the prior orders, and finding the family court's rulings on similar fact patterns from the past several years. The nonprofit is small, the caseload is large, and the time per case is short.

The system reads the petition, ACS records, and prior court filings on a case, and produces a summary of the procedural posture: where the case is, what has been ordered, what is pending, and which deadlines are active. It identifies the named parties, the alleging social worker, the prior judges, and the dates that matter.

It then queries the practice's own database of prior Article 10 matters and the family court's prior rulings on similar fact patterns from the last several years, with cites back to the orders themselves. The output is a brief written for an attorney walking into a hearing with limited time, not a research report. The cites are real, the page references are real, and the summaries are written the way the practice's own attorneys write.

The practice runs the system on its own infrastructure. The case files do not leave the practice's environment.

Attorneys arrive at hearings with a clearer view of the procedural history and the relevant precedent. The practice can take cases that would previously have been turned away for lack of capacity, which matters because in this work the alternative is an unrepresented child or parent.

The practice owns the code and the database. As the practice handles more matters, the database gets richer, and the next attorney walking into the next hearing has more to draw on.