Tom Cedoz

A working library for legal departments

Most of the case is written before anyone sues.

Checklists, frameworks, and quick-reference guides for in‑house counsel on employment risk, commercial disputes, and AI legal risk — the charge that arrived this morning, the termination scheduled for Friday, the demand letter sitting in someone’s inbox, the AI tool HR switched on without asking.

  • Free to use and share (CC BY-SA)
  • No email gate, no follow-up call
  • Most print to one or two pages
  • General information, not legal advice

Start here

All resources

Visual guide · Commercial

The Anatomy of a Lawsuit

The whole arc of a business case — pleadings, discovery, experts, summary judgment, trial — with the clocks, the cost curve, the load on your team, and the exits along the way. The map the other tools live on.

8 phases · 3 figures · prints to 8 pages

Checklist · Employment

Responding to an EEOC Charge: The First 72 Hours

What to do — and not do — in the first 72 hours after the charge arrives. Deadlines, holds, carrier notice, and the retaliation briefing.

14 items · prints to 2 pages

Framework · Employment

Termination Risk Review: Nine Questions Before You Decide

A one-page review to run before any contested termination, from the one-sentence reason to final-pay mechanics. The terminations that fall apart tend to fall apart on question two.

9 questions · 1 page

Framework · Commercial

Demand Letter Triage: The First Week

A first-week sequence for any serious demand: deadlines, preservation, insurance notice, the contract itself, and choosing a response posture on purpose.

8 steps · 2 pages

Checklist · Cross-practice

Litigation Hold: Trigger to Release

When the duty to preserve attaches, what a defensible hold covers, the sources teams forget, and how to end a hold without breaking your retention policy.

full lifecycle · 2 pages

AI changes the workflow, not your legal duties. For the in-house team deciding what to adopt, how to govern it, and who answers when it gets something wrong.

Quick reference · AI & risk

What AI Is Actually Good At — and What It Isn’t

A buyer’s field guide for cutting through the pitch: where AI genuinely reduces risk, where it manufactures it, and the questions to ask any vendor.

good-fit table · 2 pages

Framework · AI & risk

AI in Hiring: An Employment-Law Risk Review

Adverse impact, ADA, and bias-audit exposure when an algorithm screens your applicants — and why “the vendor built it” is not a defense.

risk review · 2 pages

The record that decides a dispute is written in ordinary weeks — a policy update, a performance review, an email no one thought twice about. These tools are for writing it on purpose.

ManufacturingHealthcareTransportationTechnology

Built for the people who own these problems in-house. If something here is useful, take it. The full library

Recent writing

All insights
  • Commentary · AI

    Why AI Invents Cites

    The model guesses the next bit of text. An agent is that guesser with tools and a stop. The legal trouble is in the machine.

    August 2026

  • App · iOS

    MI Litigator

    Michigan and federal court rules on the phone. Offline. Free. 1,867 rules, nine libraries, no account.

    August 2026

  • Commentary · AI governance

    AI Regulation Did Not Retreat

    The 2026 pullback in AI regulation is real — and misread. The deadlines that moved, the machinery date that didn’t, and the Workday docket where the real rules are being written.

    July 2026

  • Commentary · Apple v. OpenAI

    When an Employee Leaves With Work Product

    Most trade-secret complaints are stretch cases. Apple’s filing against OpenAI, as pleaded, is not — a litigator on the line between skill that moves and work product that doesn’t.

    July 2026

Missing something? If there’s a checklist or framework your team keeps wishing existed, say so — the library grows where readers point it.