A public-records dossier in one afternoon
A small dispute, of the kind every family knows: a Florida gym kept billing after a cancellation, and the amount was not worth a lawyer's retainer. Which is precisely why it is worth describing. What follows is one afternoon of work by the principal's AI assistant, on public records, with every document held for a human signature. The business is not named here because the dispute is live and the point is the method.
What was read, in order
- The state corporate registry. The legal entity behind the trade name, its officers, its filing history, and a related fictitious-name registration that had expired years earlier and pointed to an entirely different line of business. Ten minutes, and the counterparty stopped being a brand and became a company with a paper trail.
- The state's licensing registry. Florida's Health Studio Act requires businesses that sell future services contracts to register with the state's consumer-services department. The registry search for the county returned no matching registration for the business. That single absent line is the difference between a complaint letter and a statutory one.
- The public complaint record. Reviews and complaints across the open platforms, read back a decade. The same billing pattern, in other customers' words, dated and quotable: cancellations honored on paper and charged in practice.
- The federal trademark file. The brand's own trademark application, filed years ago and still sitting unexamined. A small fact, but it rounds out the picture of how the counterparty keeps its own house.
What came out of it
By evening: a demand letter citing the specific sections of Florida's Health Studio Act, the registration gap, the billing record, and the complaint pattern, with every factual claim traceable to the registry it came from. Drafted by the AI assistant, read and corrected by a person, and sent under that person's name. The counterparty's registered agent and officers were already identified, so service of anything that follows is a lookup, not a project.
The method, plainly
- Recall before research. Check what is already known before spending an hour rediscovering it.
- Registries before opinions. The corporate registry, the licensing list, the court index and the official records are read first, because everything else is commentary on them.
- A citation on every line. A packet a professional can verify in minutes is worth ten summaries nobody can check.
- Gaps named, not papered over. Where a county hides its search behind a wall, the packet says so.
- A person signs. Research runs autonomously. Nothing leaves in a person's name until that person has read it.