Most of the legal information you actually need to live in this country already exists. It is sitting in state legislative archives, court opinion databases, agency rulebooks, and the formal opinion letters that state Attorneys General write to answer their own state's hardest legal questions. None of it is secret. Some of it is genuinely useful.
It is also, in practice, unreadable to the people whose lives it affects. A homeowner with a question about HOA powers. A small business owner wondering whether a non-compete is enforceable. A renter trying to figure out what counts as constructive eviction. These people are not going to read a 14-page PDF from the State of Arkansas with the citation header "Op. No. 2013-098" at the top. They are going to call a lawyer if they can afford one. Otherwise they are going to guess.
That gap is the whole problem. Legal "publicity" in the United States is a paper formality. Nobody actually finds most of it.
We have been publishing two free things to chip away at this.
State Attorney General opinions, in plain English
State AGs spend a meaningful part of their jobs answering written legal questions from state agencies, legislators, prosecutors, and local officials. The answers are issued as formal opinions. They are not binding the way a court ruling is binding. They are how a state explains to itself what its own law means. Lawyers cite them, and courts often defer to them when an agency is interpreting a statute the agency administers.
You will not find most of them on Google in a useful form. They are hosted on the state AG's own site, scanned as PDFs, indexed by opinion number if at all, and written in the dense formal register lawyers reserve for talking to other lawyers.
We are turning these into plain-English pages. So far that means 6,500+ opinions across many states, with the biggest sets currently in Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, New York, and Mississippi. Each opinion page has:
- The original source, preserved with its citation and a link back to the state AG
- A short plain-English answer to the actual question
- A walkthrough of the AG's reasoning, written for someone who has never read a legal opinion before
- The statutes the AG relied on
- A currency note when the opinion is dated or the law has since moved
- A "common questions" section that anticipates what a normal person would actually want to know next
The full library lives at /ag-opinions. It is free, and it does not require an account.
15,000+ legal templates, also free
There are more than 15,000 free legal templates at /browse-templates, sorted by category and jurisdiction. Some are universal. Most are state-specific, because the law is state-specific. The page tells you which is which. If a template needs a state-equivalent provision swapped in, the page says so.
Why
Two reasons, honestly. The first is that we think Americans should be able to read the law that applies to them, and right now most cannot. The second is that publishing useful free reference material is how a small software company gets found. Both are real. We are not pretending the second one isn't.
The paid part of Ezel is the AI workspace for drafting, editing, researching, and verifying real legal documents end to end. That is what the company sells. The AG opinion library and the template library are something else: reference material on the same site, with no account required. If you only ever use the free part, that is fine.
What we are working on next
The shortlist:
- More states. The current library skews toward states with cleaner public data. The harder ones are sitting behind Incapsula challenges, content filters, and 403 walls that pretend the information is not public. We are working through them.
- More years per state. Even where we have a state, we usually do not have every year of its opinions yet. We are filling in the back catalogue.
- Better cross-linking. An AG opinion that cites a statute should let you click through to the statute. A template that invokes a state-specific concept should link to the AG opinion that explains it.
Browse the AG opinions library · Browse the template library