Small team. Explicit governance. No silent decisions.
Funders and journalists deserve to know who is doing the work, who is reviewing it, and where the lines are drawn. This page is the answer.
J. Patrick White
Founder-operator and AI systems builder with 13+ years across finance, private real estate securities, real estate operations, logistics, and full-stack automation. Builds evidence-first AI infrastructure for high-stakes document workflows: immutable vaults, chain-of-custody records, OCR/PDF ingestion, retrieval systems, citation validation, adversarial review, and source-grounded reporting. Combines USC Marshall finance training, former FINRA Series 7/63 experience, operational leadership across 40+ rental units, and hands-on engineering with Python, TypeScript, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Docker, cloud infrastructure, and LLM APIs.
Open seats
We are actively recruiting advisors across four domains. The advisory board reviews protocol changes, governance decisions, and major content additions to CASEFORUM before launch.
Practitioners with experience in child welfare, civil rights, or pro se support.
Reviewers familiar with Ed25519, content-addressed storage, and adversarial verification design.
Editors and reporters who consume court records and have opinions about authenticity tooling.
People who think hard about how to ship AI tools to people in crisis without harm.
What we are, in writing
- Legal entity
NORA Foundation. 501(c)(3) determination in process; tax-deductibility currently not in force.
- Fiscal sponsorship
Under evaluation as an interim path for grants requiring 501(c)(3) status. We will publish the choice before accepting major grants.
- Related entities
Both NORA Foundation and Nora’s Law Foundation were founded by J. Patrick White; the entities maintain separate boards, finances, and decision-making, and Nora’s Law Foundation’s IRS tax-exempt determination status is pending. Formal status disclosures are updated quarterly.
- Conflicts policy
The founder is a party in active civil and family-law matters. Those matters are not part of foundation work, are not eligible for CASEFORUM curation, and the founder recuses from any CASEFORUM editorial decision touching them. CASEFORUM editorial sign-off requires advisory-board concurrence; no case will be published before at least two non-founder advisors approve.
- Public artifacts
Canon spec, NORA-1, CHIPS Copilot, and verifier code are public. In-progress repos open on milestone basis.
- Transparency reports
Quarterly, beginning at v1 launch. Signed under NORA Canon — verifiable by anyone without our cooperation.
Public artifacts under github.com/NORAFoundation. Audit the Canon protocol, CHIPS Copilot, and the verifier.
Openagent@norafoundation.io — AI drafts a reply, human reviews and follows up. Grant inquiries answered within two business days. Case-specific or legal questions get the same refusal as NORA-1 and a referral to a state lawyer-referral service.
EmailNORA Foundation does not give legal advice. NORA-1, CHIPS Copilot, and LawLlama produce drafts and analyses — they do not substitute for licensed counsel. The unauthorized practice of law is a hard line we do not cross.