It fills the forms. It explains what is happening. It never tells you what to do.
Recourse is a self-serve legal-aid desk for California rental housing — built for the tenant who was just served and the small landlord who cannot afford to get the eviction wrong.
The forms are public. Knowing which ones you need is not.
California publishes every form a housing case needs. It does not publish the knowledge of which ones apply to you, in what order, by when, or what the words on them mean. That gap is where most self-represented people lose — not on the merits, on the paperwork.
Recourse runs a structured intake interview, drafts the correct forms from the facts you give it, audits them, and hands back a single package: every form the matter needs plus a plain-language guide written at a sixth-grade reading level that walks through to the end of the issue.
The self-represented tenant
“I got served, or my deposit was not returned, and I cannot afford a lawyer. What are my forms and what happens next?”
The small landlord
“I need to do this correctly and not have it thrown out on a technicality.”
The solo attorney
“Draft the packet from the client's documents and give me a clean explainer so I am not billing hours for hand-holding.”
The legal-aid clinic
“Let supervised non-attorneys and students prepare audited drafts a supervising attorney signs.”
California already defines the lane. We built inside it.
California law lets a non-lawyer prepare a self-represented person's legal documents at their direction, hand them published legal information, and file documents on their behalf. It does not let that non-lawyer advise which form to use, which strategy to pursue, or what the law means for that person's case. Recourse is an automated expression of exactly that lane.
Commercial legal software may never infer a person's defenses for them.
That reading of California law is why Recourse is two products rather than one. The self-serve surface is strictly ministerial — it fills what you tell it and never maps your facts onto a legal theory. The second surface may do that mapping, and only under a live supervising attorney.
One of them is allowed to think. The other is not, on purpose.
Recourse
Ministerial only. Runs the interview, fills the forms, audits them, explains the process. It does not map your facts onto defenses, because a commercial product doing that is the line California enforces. Lives at recourse.thedemocracy.studio.
Recourse Access
Attorney-supervised. The only surface that may take a set of facts and identify the defenses in them — and only while a supervising attorney is seated. It pauses itself automatically whenever that seat is empty, which is its condition today. Lives at access.thedemocracy.studio.
Built, deployed, and deliberately switched off.
Both surfaces are live on the internet and both say the same thing when you visit them: not operating, pending counsel, no attorney seated. The operator console runs the whole internal loop end to end — create a case, ingest a document, run the interview, produce a packet, route it to an attorney review gate, deliver — as a watermarked demonstration.
What stands between this and a real product is not code. It is outside counsel on the unauthorized-practice question and the formation of the two entities the structure above requires. Until that clears, the gates stay shut.
The evidence package exists and has not been sent.
There is a drafted package for California counsel reviewing this: the decision tree the product runs on, the audits it has been through, the test suite that holds the boundaries, and the specific questions we need answered before anything is switched on. If reviewing it is something you would consider, that is the conversation we are trying to have.