Funding the public proof layer for an AI-era legal system.
NORA Foundation builds open, cryptographically verifiable infrastructure so that anyone — without our cooperation — can prove a court record, exhibit, or claim is what it says it is. The same primitive serves pro se litigants, journalists, public defenders, and watchdogs.
Pro se prevalence sourced from the Self-Represented Litigation Network (srln.org). NORA does not publish a single point estimate; civil pro se appearances are tracked in the tens of millions annually across U.S. state courts.
A neutral, cryptographic primitive for “this record is real” is the missing piece of civic AI infrastructure.
Every other public-good infrastructure layer has a verifier of last resort: TLS for the web, DNSSEC for naming, Signal for messaging, Bitcoin for value. Legal records do not.
NORA Canon is that primitive. It is small, falsifiable, and runs on commodity infrastructure. Once a record is sealed under Canon, no party — including NORA — can quietly alter it without the alteration being mathematically obvious to anyone who looks.
We are not building a court. We are building the verifier the courts, journalists, and pro se litigants can share.
What breaks when records can't be verified.
Records can be edited, suppressed, or fabricated.
Court records are the only thing that survives bad-faith institutions, yet they are routinely altered, sealed without notice, or quietly disappeared. The people who depend on them most have the least leverage to verify them.
Verification today requires institutional cooperation.
To prove a docket entry is real, you currently need the court (which may be the bad actor) or a paid service (which charges per-look). There is no neutral, public, cryptographic primitive for 'this record is what it says it is.'
AI is about to multiply the problem.
Generative AI makes synthetic court records, fake screenshots, and convincing fabricated transcripts trivial. Without a falsifiable trust layer, the default assumption about any digital legal record will become 'could be fake.' That breaks the system.
The window is open for the next 18 months.
The Wisconsin and Minnesota courts have public dockets but no machine-verifiable provenance — we can attest them today.
Cloudflare AI Gateway + Ed25519 + content-addressed storage make a public attestation lane affordable on commodity infrastructure.
Foundations from civic-tech to AI-safety are explicitly funding infrastructure for "AI-era authenticity."
Pro se litigation is increasing in every state. Cost-of-counsel is rising; the access gap is widening.
A primitive that compounds across four overlapping audiences.
The protocol is the same. The wrapper changes. Each audience uses the same Canon-attested records for a different purpose.
civil pro se appearances per the Self-Represented Litigation Network (srln.org) — family, housing, debt, small claims.
need verifiable court-record snapshots; today pay PACER + private services.
understaffed; tools are decades behind the bar.
oversight depends on records that the institution being watched controls.
What's shipped, what's building, what's open.
Source-available specification. Open peer review. Source repo + license active.
AI email agent on Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects + MCP server. Anyone can email it; an AI drafts a reply for human review. Case-specific or legal questions get the same refusal as NORA-1 and a referral to a state lawyer-referral service.
Live on this site. Same Claude/Cloudflare lane as agent@. Demonstrates the platform voice for funders today.
FastAPI + Google ADK + sandboxed workspaces. Codebase active in private repos. Member access planned Q3 2026.
WI + MN court-records ingestion working. Initial public cases targeted for v1 launch.
American Association of Pro Se Litigants. Founding-member rolls open at aapl.norafoundation.io.
Where each NORA product sits today.
Four stages, public criteria. Modeled on the CNCF Sandbox → Incubating → Graduated ladder, adapted for an attestation stack: Spec → Pilot → Production → Audited. A product only advances when the criteria are publicly met.
- Stage 1Spec
Written, public, reviewable. No running code required.
Requires: Published RFC or design doc, open for comment.
- Stage 2Pilot
Reference implementation exists; in real-world use by us.
Requires: Public code + working deployment + at least one live user.
- Stage 3Production
Shipping to outside users on a stable interface.
Requires: Versioned release, license stated, support channel open.
- Stage 4Audited
Third-party security + protocol review on record.
Requires: Published audit report from an independent party.
- PilotNORA Canon v0.2
Spec + reference impl in Meridian-Cannon, public. Third-party audit targeted Q4 2026.
- ProductionCHIPS Copilot
Public MIT release, versioned. External adoption tracked from public-launch.
- PilotNORA-1
Live conversational guide on this site. Same Cloudflare lane as agent@.
- Productionagent@
Handles inbound at agent@norafoundation.io. Worker + Durable Objects + MCP.
- SpecCASEFORUM v1
Curation pipeline working. Public v1 launch targeted Q3 2026.
- SpecLawLlama web v1
Three-plane architecture documented. Browser experience targeted Q3 2026.
The 12-month build.
Full roadmap detail: /roadmap.
We are raising a 12-month operating budget to ship v1.
We are explicitly pre-launch. Donations and grants now fund the build, not maintenance of an existing product. Every dollar is accounted for in the quarterly transparency report that begins at v1 launch.
We accept individual donations, recurring giving, foundation grants, restricted grants for CASEFORUM curation, and in-kind support (legal review, security audit, infrastructure credits).
Major-gift conversations and grant applications are most useful when they start with a specific milestone — see the roadmap quarters above. We can scope a restricted grant to any of them.
Cloud infra, AI inference, audits, security review, code review.
501(c)(3) filing, privacy review, content moderation policy, records retention.
Domain, email, document storage, payment processing fees.
What we're honest about.
Pre-501(c)(3). IRS determination in process. Donations are currently NOT tax-deductible — we say this in writing on every donate page.
Pat White (Founder, J. Patrick White) is the sole officer pending board formation.
Fiscal sponsorship is under consideration as an interim path; we will publish the choice before accepting major grants.
Quarterly transparency reports begin at v1 launch — cryptographically signed under NORA Canon.
All commits are public on GitHub for the open-source artifacts; private repos for in-progress code will be opened on a milestone basis.
Who's building.
13+ years across finance, private real estate securities, and operations (40+ rental units). Builds evidence-first AI infrastructure: immutable vaults, chain-of-custody, OCR/PDF pipelines, retrieval, citation validation, and adversarial review. USC Marshall finance + former FINRA 7/63. Hands-on with Python, TypeScript, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Docker, and LLM systems.
We are actively forming an advisory board across civic tech, public-interest law, evidence standards, and cryptographic protocol design. Interested? Email agent@norafoundation.io.
Detail: /team.
For major gifts and grant officers.
We respond to grant inquiries within two business days. For restricted grants, please include the roadmap milestone you would like to underwrite.