Why Receipts.law exists

Most workplace-retaliation cases fail not because the employee was wrong, but because they were unprepared. This is the tool we wish we'd had.

What Receipts.law is

Receipts.law is a free, AI-assisted tool that helps employees organize evidence and prepare for a consultation with a licensed attorney about a workplace-retaliation or employment-discrimination concern. It is a workplace-documentation and case-preparation product — a place to turn a phone full of screenshots and a stressful few months into a clear, dated, organized record.

It is not a law firm, it does not give legal advice, and it never predicts whether you will win or what your case is worth. What it does is take the raw material of your situation and structure it the way an employment attorney would want to see it — so your first consultation can be twenty focused minutes instead of three billable hours of untangling.

Who it's for

Receipts.law is built for employees who believe something wrong happened at work and want to be ready before they talk to a lawyer. That often looks like:

• You reported unsafe conditions, harassment, discrimination, or a wage problem — and then hours were cut, a write-up appeared, or you were pushed out.
• You have screenshots, pay stubs, emails, and write-ups scattered across your phone and inbox, but no organized timeline.
• You have talked to (or want to talk to) an attorney, and you want your facts organized enough that they can actually evaluate your situation.

It is not for submitting someone else's case without their consent, and it is not a bot pipeline — the Terms of Service spell out acceptable use. If you want to understand the underlying legal concept first, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission explains what workplace retaliation is in plain language.

How it works

1. Structured intake. Answer guided questions across 8 sections that map to what an employment attorney asks in a first meeting — or just tell your story in your own words and let the tool extract the structure. Takes about 15 minutes; no account required.
2. Evidence vault. Upload pay stubs, emails, write-ups, and photos. Receipts.law sorts them into evidence categories, computes a SHA-256 hash of each file for chain-of-custody, and reads text out of your screenshots and PDFs.
3. Attorney-grade prep. Get back organized deliverables — a counsel brief, a settlement-value framework (categories and gaps, never a dollar prediction), a case timeline, and pattern matches against a verified corpus of real federal precedents — everything an attorney needs to evaluate your case quickly.

Why we started

Receipts.law came out of watching someone we knew fight a retaliation case. They had reported unsafe conditions at work. Within days, an adverse action landed. Hours were cut. Records were "updated." A signed document appeared that didn't match the original.

They did one thing right: they photographed everything early. Original onboarding documents. Original training records. Every email to HR. Contemporaneous, dated, on their own phone.

And then they sat down to talk to attorneys. The pattern was always the same: "Your story sounds compelling, but I'd need to spend twenty hours organizing all of this before I could even tell you whether you have a case. And I can't take that on contingency without evaluating it first." Smaller firms didn't have bandwidth. Bigger firms wanted retainers.

So we started building. First as a one-off case-organization workspace. Then we realized: every employee in this situation needs this. Most never get it.

What we believe

• The asymmetry is real. Employers have HR, in-house counsel, document-retention policies, and a financial incentive to outlast you. You have your memory and your phone.
• Most cases don't fail in court. They fail before they get there — at the consultation stage — because the facts aren't organized enough for an attorney to evaluate.
• The doctrine matters. Courts have spent decades building frameworks (Burlington v. White, Vance v. Ball State, Faragher-Ellerth) that protect employees in exactly these situations. Most employees have never heard of them. Most evidence is presented without reference to them.
• AI is good at organization. We don't use it to predict outcomes (we never will). We use it to surface patterns, anchor facts to doctrine, and produce the kind of materials an attorney can read in twenty minutes instead of three hours.
• Anonymized data should drive the product. The Reddit pain-points we mine, the precedent corpus we cite, the patterns we surface — all of it is anonymized aggregate. Your individual case content is encrypted, private, and never used to train any AI.

What we won't do

• We will never predict the outcome of your case. That's a licensed attorney's call.
• We will never give you legal advice. We describe doctrine; an attorney applies it.
• We will never sell your data, share it with employers, or use your case content to train AI models.
• We will never tell you to file something by a specific date. Deadlines are jurisdiction-specific; we'll surface that they may be running, but the attorney calculates the specifics.

How we make money

Right now: we don't. Receipts.law is free during private beta. If the model proves itself useful, we'll add a paid tier for advanced features (longer event histories, document-templating, deeper attorney-finder coverage) while keeping the core intake + analysis + deliverables free.

We will not run ads, and we will not sell access to your data to plaintiff-side law firms or anyone else.

How we write the articles

Every article on this site links here, because a reader has a right to know how the thing they are reading was made before deciding how much to trust it.

There is no named attorney on these pages, and we are not going to invent one. Adding a lawyer's name we haven't hired, or a credential nobody holds, would be the single fastest way to make this site untrustworthy. What we do instead is show our work.

• Case citations link to the opinion. Where an article names a case, the first mention links to the full text on CourtListener, the Free Law Project's public database. You never have to take our word for what a case says — read it.
• Citations are machine-verified before they are published. Every case name is checked against CourtListener's records, and the match has to agree on the named party, not just the general shape of the caption. Anything that doesn't verify is left unlinked rather than dressed up as a source. Articles with no verified citation say nothing about CourtListener at all.
• Articles carry a visible "Updated" date when they've been revised, so you can see how current the page is without digging through page source.
• The law changes and we will sometimes be behind it. If you find something out of date or wrong, tell us and we'll fix it or pull the page.

What this is not: it isn't review by a licensed attorney, and it can't tell you how the law applies to your facts, in your state, this year. That's the job of a lawyer, and the disclaimer below is not boilerplate — it's the actual boundary of what these pages can do for you.

The disclaimer that ends every page on this site

Contact

Feedback, bug reports, and "this helped me" emails are all welcome. We're listening. (Contact details will appear here once we set up a public-facing inbox.)