An intake tool for tenants, built for legal aid.
Try it: https://czocher2-boop.github.io/threshold/
This is purely intake triage. It asks questions and organizes the answers. It never tells anyone what their rights are. What comes out goes to a lawyer or a trained advocate, and that person decides.
Texas landlord/tenant first. California second.
Three things:
- A memo for the file.
- A list of things for a tenant to raise when they talk to a human.
- A tenant's own answers, back to them, in their own words, by whatever channel they pick.
A working prototype — index.html, a single self-contained file, live at the link above. All nine intake doors run from the first question to the three outputs; none of them dead-ends. Two are built out in full: something broken in my unit, and a notice of eviction. The eviction door carries the gate — if a hearing has already happened, intake stops and routes to a person instead of finishing the form.
It saves nothing, sends nothing, and connects to nothing. Every answer in it is made up. It is a demonstration of shape, not a deployment.
And the specifications — prompts, field schemas, and the reasoning behind every judgment call. The documents came first and are still the more complete half; the prototype exists so the shape can be argued with by people who would rather click than read.
The specs carry their own warnings. Where a case or a statute was recalled and not verified at the source, it says so. Where a search turned up nothing, it says the search was not exhaustive. Those flags are left in on purpose.
- Never legal advice to a tenant. Not once, not hedged.
- A tenant can finish it alone. Help is a lane, never a step.
- Never invent a date. A tenant's words in one column, any inference labeled unconfirmed in another.
- No legal term without a plain gloss in parentheses.
- Every deadline is treated as valid, and the tool never calculates one.
- Declining to answer is a value, not a blank. Recorded as declined — never as zero, never as missing.
- Anything whose failure is unacceptable lives in code, not in a prompt.
Free to use, share, and build on. With credit, and not for sale. See LICENSE.md.
If you are a nonprofit, a legal aid program, a public defender, a clinic, a volunteer, or a tenant: this is yours. Use it.
Nothing in this repository is legal advice, and nothing here creates a lawyer-client relationship with anyone.
Built by Lee Czocher, with Claude (Ordo).
The design is hers — what the tool refuses to do, where it stops, and who it stops for. The prototype was built to those rulings.
She is a lawyer and does not write code. That is the point of the thing, not a caveat on it.