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bench.lawyer

Firm supply · enrollment live

Your bench earns between matters.

Enrolled openly, conflicts screened once at the firm grain, under your own comp plan. The firm is an envelope: your members stay the actors, each on their own license, each with their own Register.

Your bench already moonlights. The only open question is whether the firm can see it.

The verb ledger

Three owners, never mixed. The boundary is the design.

Your firmthe envelopeenrolls · declares · consolidates · views
Your membersthe actorsclear · claim · review · sign · decline
The platformthe burdenmatches · verifies · carries · meters · pays

A firm never signs, never claims, never attests, never holds a Register.

The enrollment register

Enroll your bench

Optional. A past fact serves better than a plan: what the bench actually did in the last slow month.

Submit, and your firm is recorded to the intake register. Nothing binds your members: each acts later under their own license, or not at all.

The intake register is used to contact your firm as its cohort comes up, and for nothing else; the record goes nowhere beyond this door, and a recorded firm can ask for its entry at any time.

The problem

The idle bench, and its covert shadow.

Payroll is annual; matters are episodic. Your bench sits idle in the gap, and your associates already moonlight covertly, because the outside-practice clause forecloses the honest version. Rule 1.10 imputes your whole firm either way, sanctioned or not.

The managing partner

Pays for a trained bench that sits idle between matters. The gap between the hours the firm sells and the hours it pays for is felt every month and measured never.

The small-firm owner

Hired for the busy season and carries the slow one. Every associate kept through a trough is a bet the next matter lands first. Every associate lost is training capital handed to a competitor, or to a shingle.

The practice-group lead

Knows exactly which members are light this month and has no sanctioned channel to put that judgment to work. Also knows, because everyone knows, that some of them moonlight anyway.

The shape of it

The firm is an envelope, never an actor.

Everything reserved stays individual, by design. The envelope adds the things only a firm can add: bulk enrollment, a roster view, routing preferences, consolidated payout. Nothing else.

Individuals remain the actors
Every license, Register, and attestation is personal and non-transferable. A firm never signs, never claims, never attests, and never holds a Register.
Open enrollment replaces covert moonlighting
Your bench enrolls openly and claims under declared firm policy. The outside work you already answer for moves where you can see it: sanctioned, screened, on the record.
Conflicts screened once, at the firm grain
A firm-grain pre-screen runs ahead of the member Clearance that fires on every matter. It waives nothing: Rule 1.10 imputation stands exactly as before.
The roster is derived, never asserted
The roster your firm reads is a projection computed on every read from the eligibility lattice: credential elements live, standing fresh, coverage in force. No Register is opened for it, and a refusal is never scored. Each row exists only under that member’s own enrollment grant, revocable unilaterally; a revoked grant blanks the row on the next read. No firm-level scores, no firm-held Registers, no substituting one member for another mid-Gig.

The plan

You declare. Your members act.

Three steps, none of them a project.

  1. 01Declare the envelope.Your firm states its posture once: outside-work policy, comp-plan treatment, routing preferences. Governance you already own, written down where it can do work.
  2. 02Enroll the bench openly.Members verify individually, bar admission or USPTO registration against the official roster, each under their own credential. Bulk enrollment is your convenience; the credential and the record stay personal.
  3. 03The bench earns between matters.A firm pre-screen and the member’s own Clearance run before every match. The member claims, reviews, and signs or declines under your policy; the roster view shows it. The work is flat-fee review at the gigs.lawyer door, USPTO practice first, every fee fixed before claim; recording your firm costs nothing.

Fees and coverage

Flat fees, a named insured, one lawful consolidation.

Stated exactly, or marked undecided. Nothing is papered over.

The fee promise
The Legal Fee is flat, fixed at post time, and 100% the Signer’s own. Platform fees are flat and separately invoiced, never scaled to a legal fee. Government fees pass through at cost.
The remittance boundary
Rule 5.4 exempts fee-sharing among lawyers in the same firm, so consolidated remittance to your firm is lawful there: intra-firm, under your comp plan. Where the Merchant-of-Record sits on the State Rail is an open question, awaiting platform counsel.
The coverage promise
Coverage names the acting member as the insured and must be verified in force before anything is signable: a member’s own qualifying policy counts today, and a group Umbrella E&O program is planned for members without one.
The side promise
Your firm is never a Tenant or on the demand side. A firm buying products is a Customer; supplying its bench makes it an envelope, never a fee-touching partner.

Where this stands

Enrollment is live. Bounded on purpose.

The form above is live: submitting records your firm to the intake register today, as a firm, not one more individual signup. Onboarding opens in cohorts; we contact firms as their profile comes up. This page promises the record, not a docket of waiting matters. An attorney who wants this for their own license starts at gigs.lawyer, the primary door, open now.

Firms that declare their posture early set the terms their bench works under. Firms that wait inherit whatever posture their members improvised.

The envelope memo: this page as plain text, citation-grade, written to be forwarded to ethics counsel.