"I run a solo criminal defence practice focused on legal aid cases. I am an expert in the law, not in technology. I needed a way to handle the work in a changing world — to actually meet the obligations the Crown and the Law Society place on me, without having to become a system administrator to do it."
The problem
A solo or small-firm BC criminal defence lawyer can do exemplary legal
work and still have a Downloads folder full of .7z
archives, body-camera video sitting unencrypted on a personal laptop,
and Crown-supplied passwords in three different email threads. The gap
between "what compliance looks like" and "what a Tuesday afternoon
between court appearances actually involves" is real, and it is not a
gap of professionalism. It is a gap of tooling.
The collaboration
Particulars is the product of a ten-year working relationship between a BC technology advisor and a BC Interior criminal defence lawyer. During those ten years the technologist watched the same operational pain repeat, file after file: passwords in inboxes, supplementals lost in Downloads, body-cam footage that wouldn't open in any practical tool, the same client returning under a fresh file number with no obvious link back to the prior matter. Each time the workaround was individual. None of them generalized.
The platform was specified, designed, and engineered against five years of Mr. Thompsons actual disclosure archive. He is the design partner and the first user. Every workflow it captures is a workflow that we have had to invent by hand at least once.
Sudohuman Labs Inc.
Sudohuman Labs Inc. is a British Columbia company based in the BC Interior founded by James Bethell and Paulyn Chua. James has been Mr. Thompson's technical assistant for over a decade. He is additionally a qualified Information security practitioner whose certifications include Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator (CHFI), Certified Threat Intelligence Analyst (CTIA), and EC-Council Certified Encryption Specialist (ECES). Paulyn is a Certified Professional Accountant (CPA), having received her Chartered Professional Accountant designation in 2005 and has worked in both public and private sectors for over 20 years. Particulars is the product of working around one specific problem, every week, for a long time, and finally deciding to build the thing that solved it.
Christopher H. Thompson
Design partner and first user. BC Interior criminal defence lawyer with a focus on Legal Aid BC tariff work.
What this is, and what it isn't
Particulars is not a practice management system. It does not handle trust accounting, calendaring, time tracking, or invoicing for client work. It does not try to. Keep using Clio, PCLaw, CosmoLex, or whatever you already trust — Particulars sits beside it as the specialty layer for secure disclosure materials management, not on top of it as a replacement. What it handles is disclosure: receiving it, organizing it, securing it, reviewing it, sharing it under your supervision, and retaining it for the seven years the rules require. That is the entire scope, and the discipline of that scope is the point.