I was trying to solve a problem in my own life.
I found myself navigating a family law matter as a self-represented litigant.
It was personal. It was complicated. And it mattered.
I needed help.
But I also discovered a practical reality that many people face: having a lawyer handle every question, every document and every stage of a legal matter simply wasn't financially realistic.
So I had to learn.
I had to understand documents. Organize messages and emails. Keep track of dates and events. Go back through information that stretched across months and years.
And somewhere inside all of that were the things that actually mattered.
THE INFORMATION WAS THERE. THE CLARITY WASN’T.
That became one of my biggest frustrations.
I wasn't necessarily missing information.
I had too much of it.
An important conversation could be buried inside hundreds of messages.
Something said months earlier could suddenly become relevant to something happening today.
Something I remembered clearly still needed to be checked against the actual record.
And when you're personally involved in a family matter, you're doing all of this while living through the situation itself.
I kept thinking:
There has to be a better way.
That question stayed with me.
And eventually, I did what I tend to do when I encounter a problem that won't leave me alone.
I started building.
RIISAN is the working name for the evidence software I'm developing. The name may change as the project evolves.
What began as something I needed for myself started raising much bigger questions.
Could technology help someone make sense of large amounts of evidence?
Could complicated information become easier to understand?
Could we make it easier to find what matters without losing sight of where the information originally came from?
The deeper I went, the more I realized something important:
This wasn't just my problem.
THE PROBLEM IS MUCH BIGGER THAN ME.
I started with the experience I knew firsthand — being self-represented.
But then I began looking beyond myself.
SELF-REPRESENTED LITIGANTS
People can find themselves facing an enormous amount of information at one of the most difficult moments of their lives, while trying to understand a system they may never have encountered before.
Sometimes they have professional legal help. Sometimes they can afford that help only at certain stages. Sometimes they're navigating much of it themselves.
The information may be there.
Understanding what matters is another challenge entirely.
LEGAL PRACTITIONERS
Then there are lawyers and other legal professionals dealing with the other side of the information problem.
Large document sets. Communications. Evidence. Different accounts of what happened. Years of information.
And time matters.
Again, the problem isn't necessarily a lack of information.
Sometimes it's finding what matters inside all of it.
INVESTIGATORS & ANALYSTS
Investigators and analysts encounter another version of the same challenge.
Information can be scattered across documents, communications, people, organizations and long periods of time.
The pieces may already exist.
The challenge is connecting them.
Different users. Different professions. Different stakes.
But I kept seeing a common problem:
Too much information. Not enough clarity.
I LIKE BIG PROBLEMS.
I've realized something about myself over the years.
I'm drawn to problems. Especially difficult ones.
I like pulling them apart. I like asking why something works the way it does. I like questioning whether it has to work that way.
And I especially like asking:
What would this look like if we started again?
That's what happened with RIISAN.
The question gradually changed from:
“How can I solve this problem for myself?”
to:
“How big is this problem?”
The answer surprised me.
Very big.
And that's where I'm going to stop.
Because I'm deliberately not going to publish everything I'm building, how I'm building it, or where I think this could eventually go.
Not yet.
INFORMATION IS EVERYWHERE. TRUST IS SCARCE.
We are entering an era where artificial intelligence can produce answers to incredibly complicated questions in seconds.
That's extraordinary.
But when the information really matters, an answer isn't enough.
Where did it come from?
Can it be verified?
What is the source?
What might have been missed?
Those questions become much more important when decisions have real consequences.
That's the territory I'm interested in.
And it's the problem I'm working on.
RIISAN is still being built.
I'm still its first customer.
The name may change.
The technology will evolve.
But the reason I started building it won't.
I encountered a problem in my own life that I wished someone had already solved.
I couldn't find what I needed.
So I stopped looking for the solution and started building one.
Sometimes, that's how a problem becomes an opportunity.
RIISAN — working title
Evidence Intelligence
— Michael Jazz™
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