Neil Williams Projects · Writing · Legal tech Working codename · work in progress
Read the record. Think with machines. Keep hold of the work.
6 On March 14, at approximately 21:47 hours, the responding officer arrived at the marina.
10 The witness described a brief meeting near the west entrance.
14 The account identifies a person, a time, and a location that may be compared with the remaining record.
18 No physical evidence was reported at the scene.
Source remains primary · proposed work is separateThe idea
Nightjar is the working codename for a new kind of case workspace for criminal-defense teams—somewhere the record, the questions, and the thinking can live together.
Case work rarely arrives as a clean question. It arrives as reports, transcripts, media, timelines, names, contradictions, and half-formed ideas that change as the record becomes familiar. Nightjar starts there.
It is not a chatbot with a pile of files attached. It is an attempt to make working a case feel clearer, more connected, and a little less lonely—while keeping the source material, the lawyer’s judgment, and the history of the work in view.
A few things we believe
The shape will change. These ideas probably won’t.
The source should never disappear behind the machinery.
AI should feel present in the work—not bolted onto the side of it.
Useful thinking should stick around, grow, and remain yours.
What it is about
The promise of AI in legal work is not that a machine can take over a case. It is that the people responsible for the case can move through a difficult record with more continuity: finding the passage again, following a question across sources, testing an idea, and preserving what they learn along the way.
Every useful answer should lead back to the material it came from. AI can help surface a thread; it should not become the source.
Nightjar is meant to support the people doing the work—not flatten uncertainty, make legal decisions, or pretend the hard parts are automatic.
Questions, passages, notes, and developing ideas should accumulate into a case memory instead of vanishing at the end of a chat.
Right now
Nightjar is private, early, and changing quickly. We are working from real legal-technology experience, testing the shape of the workspace, and building a narrow piece of the real thing. It is not ready for real case material, there is no public repository, and plenty of what you see here will move.
More later
For the people who have to read everything, notice what matters, and turn a hard record into a human story.
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