Compliance-first development

Websites and apps built to the rules that already govern you.

If your site is bound by the EU AI Act, your state bar's advertising and UPL rules, or FTC disclosure standards, those are engineering requirements — not a legal review you bolt on the week before launch. We build the product with them compiled in, and hand you the evidence that they are.

35 Years in Regulatory Compliance — Writing the Code

Thirty-five years in securities law, regulatory compliance, and forensic examination — writing the code, not reviewing it after someone else did.

BUILT COMPLIANT, NOT PATCHED

Four rulebooks. One build.

Most sites are designed first and reconciled with the law later, which is why the fixes are expensive and the disclosures read like an afterthought. These are the regimes we build to from the first commit.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 · Regulation (EU) 2016/679

EU AI Act & GDPR

One EU-resident user is enough to pull a US site into scope. Chatbots, triage widgets, and AI-drafted client communications are the usual entry point.

  • Article 50 disclosure rendered at the point of interaction, not buried in a footer
  • Risk classification of every AI feature — limited-risk, high-risk, or prohibited — documented before build
  • Human-oversight checkpoints and retained interaction logs for Annex III use cases
  • Consent management with exportable proof of consent and working deletion rights
  • Data minimization enforced in the schema, not in policy prose
ABA Model Rules 7.1–7.5 and state analogues

Bar advertising & UPL

Law-firm sites, intake portals, and anything that answers a legal question in a user's own words.

  • Advertising disclaimers, testimonial handling, and specialization claims built to your jurisdiction's rule text
  • Limited-scope engagement gating (e.g. Fla. R. 4-1.2(c)) enforced in the intake flow
  • Fee-separation and trust-account-aware payment routing (e.g. Fla. R. 4-5.4)
  • UPL boundaries encoded in AI intake — refusal paths, jurisdiction gating, referral handoffs
  • Conflict-check and engagement-letter workflows wired into the funnel
FTC Act §5 · 16 CFR 255 · ROSCA · TSR · CAN-SPAM

FTC advertising & disclosure

Every claim, price, review, subscription, and email your site sends. The rules that turn a marketing decision into an enforcement exposure.

  • Clear-and-conspicuous disclosure placement tested against the .com Disclose guidance, including mobile
  • Endorsement and review handling under 16 CFR 255 — material connections, no fabricated or AI-generated reviews
  • Substantiation trail for every performance, earnings, or outcome claim on the page
  • Auto-renewal and negative-option flows built to ROSCA and state auto-renewal statutes: disclosure, consent, and a cancellation path as simple as signup
  • CAN-SPAM email infrastructure and A2P 10DLC / TCPA-aware SMS consent capture
HIPAA · GLBA · RESPA · ADA Title III · CCPA/CPRA · SEC

Sector regimes

The statute that governs your industry specifically, and the plaintiff's bar that reads your source code before you do.

  • No tracking pixels on authenticated or PHI-adjacent routes; third-party data flows mapped and documented
  • WCAG 2.2 AA as a CI acceptance criterion, not a post-launch remediation project
  • RESPA §8-compliant lead and referral models for real estate and mortgage workflows
  • Row-level security, immutable audit trails, and HMAC-verified third-party integrations
  • Offering and disclosure surfaces built to hold up in a Reg CF or Reg D context
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689

Is your website EU AI Act compliant — and do you take clients from the EU?

This is the regime clients underestimate most, so it gets its own section. The disclosure, transparency, and human-oversight obligations landing on EU deployers today are the same ones US regulators, state AGs, and bar associations are adopting for tomorrow — which means building to them once solves both.

Article 5

Prohibited practices

Social scoring, manipulative dark patterns, and certain biometric inference are banned outright. A law-firm chatbot that pressures a lead or infers sensitive attributes can fall inside this line without anyone noticing.

Article 50

Users must know they're talking to AI

Any AI system that interacts with a natural person requires a clear, machine-readable disclosure. Synthetic content — including AI-drafted client communications — must be labeled. Most law-firm sites are not built this way.

Annex III

High-risk classification

AI used in access to justice, immigration, credit, or employment screening is high-risk. That triggers risk management, data governance, logging, human oversight, and conformity assessment — engineered in, not bolted on.

Penalties

Up to €35M or 7% of global turnover

Enforcement is not theoretical. Even a US-only firm that markets remotely and accepts an EU-resident client can be pulled into scope through the Act's extraterritorial reach.

Two questions I ask on every single intake

  1. 01Does your website, chatbot, or intake form serve — or could it reasonably serve — a user physically in the EU?
  2. 02Do you know which of your AI features would be classified as limited-risk, high-risk, or prohibited under the Act?

If either answer is "I'm not sure," those answers belong in the build spec — before the next line of code is written.

What I explicitly build in

  • Article 50 disclosures
  • UPL & jurisdictional boundaries
  • Human-oversight checkpoints
  • Data governance records
  • NIST AI RMF blueprint mapping
Start a build
Our Core Method

What compliance-first means in the build

Not a policy page and a cookie banner. These are engineering decisions made at schema and routing time, when they are still cheap.

Rule text is translated into acceptance criteria before design starts, and each criterion has a test.
Disclosures and disclaimers are components with placement rules, rendered server-side and versioned.
Consent is a logged, exportable record — not a boolean on a user row.
Intake flows carry jurisdiction gating and explicit refusal paths where the boundary is legal advice.
AI features are labeled where the user actually is, with oversight checkpoints and retained logs.
Accessibility runs in CI and fails the build, the same as a broken test.
Handoff includes a compliance binder: rule cited, control implemented, evidence attached.

The Defensible Framework

Rule text becomes acceptance criteria, acceptance criteria become tests, and the handoff includes the evidence that each one passes.

"The cheapest place to satisfy a regulation is the schema. The most expensive place is a demand letter."

Ship Log · 98 Days

Proof, not promises. Built solo.

Two production legal-tech platforms shipped in 98 days — independently estimated at $250K–$400K to procure through traditional vendors.

85+

Production Routes

87

Server Modules

58

Database Tables

RLS

Row-Level Security

HMAC

Verified Integrations

App Store

Approved Mobile App

DetencionDefensa.com

Immigration-defense intake, limited-scope engagement gating, and IOLTA-aware payment flows for detained-family emergencies.

SaveMyHomeTrust.io

Foreclosure-defense and trust-services platform with RESPA-compliant lead models and consumer-protection disclosures.

Compliance Engineered In

  • Florida Bar Rule 4-1.2(c) limited-scope engagement gating
  • Rule 4-5.4 fee separation and trust-account-aware payment flows
  • RESPA §8-compliant lead models
  • UPL disclosures and AI chatbot boundaries
  • CAN-SPAM email infrastructure and A2P 10DLC SMS registration
  • Regulator-ready compliance-binder exports

The SEC Work Behind It

  • Regulation CF offering (Form C, Crowd SAFE)
  • Institutional placement materials
  • Risk-factor drafting and Howey analysis coordination
  • DocuSign, Stripe, Plaid, and Twilio HMAC-verified integrations

What we build

Five engagements. One discipline.

Bar rules

Law-firm sites and client intake

Websites and intake portals designed around your state's advertising and ethics rules — disclaimers, testimonials, specialization claims, intake boundaries, engagement-letter workflows, and trust-account-aware payment flows.

EU AI Act

Legal-AI products with guardrails

If you're building or deploying AI for legal services, we classify what it is under the Act, map what it can and cannot do, and build the UPL boundaries, disclosures, oversight checkpoints, and logging into the product itself.

Sector law

Regulated fintech, real estate, and health platforms

Platform builds for lending, trust services, real estate, and health-adjacent workflows that have to satisfy RESPA, GLBA, HIPAA, SEC, and consumer-protection requirements to ship at all.

FTC

Regulated commerce and subscription flows

Storefronts, funnels, and recurring-billing products built to FTC advertising, endorsement, and negative-option standards — with the substantiation trail behind every claim on the page.

Audit

Review and remediation of an existing site

Already built and unsure where you stand? A fixed-fee review against the four rulebooks, with a prioritized fix list your developer can execute — or that we execute for you.

Who this is for

Solo and small-firm attorneys, immigration and consumer-facing practices, legal-tech and legal-AI startups, and real estate, fintech, and health companies operating in regulated space.

Why it costs less than you'd expect

We build with modern AI-assisted development. The last two platforms — independently estimated at $250,000–$400,000 through traditional vendors — were built for a fraction of that. You get the compliance expertise and the build in one engagement, fast.

New builds and rebuilds

Tell us what you're building and which rules reach it.

Most engagements start with a short scoping call: what the product does, who it touches, and which of the four rulebooks apply. You'll leave that call knowing your exposure whether or not we build it.

Which rules apply to you?

See the live platforms: DetencionDefensa.com · SaveMyHomeTrust.io · SaveMyHomeTrust.com