Drafted by API. Signed where the law reserves it.
One catalog, one pattern: your agent drafts the letter — and where sending it as counsel is a reserved act, the call routes to an independent attorney barred in the Client’s state. Typed, never silent.
Every letter in this catalog divides the same way. Drafting is judgment-free assembly against facts the calling agent already holds — amounts, dates, the cure period, required statutory language. That is open work: agent-native, no credential, so it meters like any other compute call. Sending the letter as counsel is a different act. A letter over an attorney’s letterhead carries force precisely because a licensed human read it, judged it, and put their name on it under their own bar admission — and an agent does not hold that license. So the send is reserved: it routes to an independent attorney barred in the Client’s state, and nothing commits past that attorney’s refusal.
The gate column tells the code the law before it calls:
| Row | Gate | What comes back |
|---|---|---|
POST /demand-letter/draft | gate: none | the drafted letter, recorded for attorney review |
POST /demand-letter/send | requiresSigner: state-bar | a typed PENDING_SIGNER, then the attested letter and delivery record by webhook |
letters.legal serves the catalog: the draft/send pattern, per-row gate status, and the preview-build candour line — “the draft is live; the signed send is described, not sold” — on the page itself.
A call that lands on a reserved act never dies at the boundary and never fakes success. It waits, typed:
The rail underneath answers keyless today with typed envelopes: GET https://api.lawyer/matters returns an OK-typed result carrying a labeled demo Matter — explicitly seeded, not a live filing.
Callability of the draft row is the rail’s statement, not yet this deck’s: keys go out in batches, and an unauthenticated probe does not reach the route. This claim flips to posted when a keyed POST /demand-letter/draft round-trips, with the transcript in evidence.
{
"status": "PENDING_SIGNER",
"effect": "act",
"gate": { "requiresSigner": "state-bar:TX" },
"signer": { "routed": true, "liveness": "FRESH" },
"eta": "PT4H"
}
The attorney’s bar admission is verified fresh at the call — a suspended admission returns a typed BLOCKED, never silence. A recipient in another state attaches the Rule 5.5(c) temporary-practice flag, which routes oversight attention and never blocks. And the attorney’s no is sovereign: a refusal is final against every process on the platform. The design is built so it cannot commit past a licensed human’s refusal — that independence is the caller’s regulatory safety, not fine print.
The catalog’s integrity is one rule, applied per row: a live row has its own page and a callable draft on the rail; an unratified row is a candidate — described honestly, dated never, and offered for nothing.
Rows go live one at a time, each behind its own ratified Jurisdiction Rule on the rail — never announced ahead of the playbook that makes them real. An unratified row converts to a live row the day it ships, not before.
Workflows that end in a legal letter are everywhere agents already run: collections and AR automation that should terminate in a demand letter, contract ops, IP enforcement. The draft was never the hard part. The hard part is that the letter’s entire force is the licensed signature on it — the one thing software cannot supply — and services in this space have historically handled that boundary with vagueness: a template that implies counsel, or a disclaimer that quietly moves the risk to the caller.
This brand’s position is that the boundary of a licensed profession should be a typed, readable fact an agent can branch on. Gate none means open work. requiresSigner: state-bar means a person the statute names. The catalog states the law in the response type, which is exactly what lets a builder wire the letter step into production without wiring in a bluff.
This brand is keyed to one buyer: the developer or agent-builder, reached B2D — the catalog read the way API docs are read, with the key funnel on the rail. The secondary path is B2A2B: the same rows addressed by an agent acting for a business. Fulfilment on any reserved send is A2H2A — agent, rail, independent attorney, back — because a statute names a person.
The consumer with one dispute — an unpaid invoice, a deposit never returned — is deliberately a different brand’s customer. That door is demandletters.legal: plain English in, a drafted letter out, one flat price. Same rail, same reserved boundary, different ICP, different motion — so neither surface has to speak two languages.
The sibling consumer door serves: plain-English intake, the same preview-build candour, and no percentage-of-recovery pricing anywhere on it.
draft meter rate–·–posts when rate card posted at api.lawyer resolves · legal fee schedule–·–posts when rate card posted at api.lawyer resolves — the shape is a design fact; the figures post when the rail’s card does, never before.
The signed send is not for sale yet, and the reason is stated on the surface itself: the State-Rail signature awaits the fee-structure survey. Until it clears, every send row is a described shape — built against today, sold never.
Every callable row lives on api.lawyer, the demand rail of the legal regulated cell. The people who sign come through gigs.lawyer, the cell’s supply door — independent attorneys on the network, claiming work under their own license, with coverage required to be in force before anything is signable. letters.legal holds the catalog position for the letter task; it performs no reserved act itself, ever.
The rail’s front door serves: the capability table with per-row gates — the demand-letter draft at gate none, the send at requiresSigner: state-bar — and the API-key funnel.
The supply door serves: the membership surface recruiting the licensed practitioners every reserved send in this catalog routes to.
The cell’s operating entity is designed, not formed. Until formation and licensure close, every reserved-send description in this catalog is a designed contract, not a live service — and this deck says so on purpose.
A preview build, worn openly: the catalog serves, the instrument page serves, the rail answers typed and keyless, and the sibling consumer door serves. The ambers are the honest edges — keyed draft round-trip, per-row ratification, the Rule 5.4 survey, and the cell’s formation gate — each stated where it bites.
The catalog is machine-legible by content negotiation: a client that does not ask for text/html receives the same page as markdown — verified by plain curl, which gets the markdown.
The catalog is letters.legal — it serves today.
If this was forwarded to you: letters.legal is the catalog of legal letters as a typed capability — drafts are open work an agent can call, signatures are reserved acts that route to independent attorneys barred in the Client’s state, and every claim above carries its own state and evidence URL. If you build agent workflows that end in a letter, start at letters.legal. If you have one dispute and no agent, your door is demandletters.legal.