Bonne Foi · Access to justice infrastructure for the underserved

The problem

Two shores. One bridge.

The person who needs a lawyer

92% get no help or inadequate help. 49% who reach out to legal aid are turned away.

Every rejection resets the clock. People re-explain everything, every time. We call it the intake wall. The person we serve is not one story, it is millions: housing, family, debt, health, employment, benefits, immigration. One in four low-income households includes a survivor of domestic violence or sexual assault.

The lawyer who wants to help

99% of attorneys say they want to do pro bono. Only 1.54% have zero interest.

The wall between them is intake, not intent. More than half of donated pro bono hours, by many program estimates, are consumed by intake, not advocacy. The lawyers are here. They cannot reach the person, and the person cannot reach them.

The next generation of litigators

Pro bono and contingency work are how young lawyers learn.

Courtroom experience, direct client interaction, cross-examination, presentation of exhibits, the elements of practice they rarely get on billable matters at scale. When those matters arrive already triaged and matched to the associate’s skill level, they spend billable-credit hours in front of a judge, not on intake. Firms train their litigators on work that matters. Fewer feel that pro bono is a burden. Fewer burn out. Fifty-one percent of mid- and senior-level associates report burnout; only 46 percent expect to stay with their firm five years from now. Purposeful case flow is the fix.

Sources: LSC 2022 Justice Gap Study (92% no or inadequate help, 49% turn-away rate, 1-in-4 DV/SA prevalence). ABA Dialogue, citing the Association of Pro Bono Counsel large-firm study (99% pro bono interest, 1.54% zero interest). Chambers Associate on Jenner & Block’s litigation-training model. Above the Law (Rothman, 2025) on junior-associate courtroom experience through pro bono. Bloomberg Law 2024 Attorney Workload Survey (51% mid- to senior-associate burnout, 46% five-year retention). Estimate of pro bono hours consumed by intake: discussed in the Bonne Foi diligence appendix.

The Rigging

We start with the fastest honest path to a lawyer.

We route, we do not rebuild. Other companies already build motion drafting and self-help forms. We sit upstream of all of them, and hand off cleanly when the next step is theirs.

MVP Preview

V1 Builds and Workflow Designs

Five steps. One honest answer instead of “we can’t help you, try someone else.”

Honest triage: bilingual welcome — 01

Honest triage

Attorney, pro se, limited scope, or legal aid. Even when that means routing away from us.

Your story in plain language — 02

Your story, in plain words

Civil, criminal, corporate, administrative. Civil is the pilot. Plain-language triage from the first tap.

03

Party mapper

Adverse, aligned, and neutral parties formatted for an ABA conflicts check in minutes.

Attorney finder criteria — 04

Attorney finder

Matched on real public case history and language. Never invented win rates.

Outreach and tracker — 05

Outreach + tracker

A personalized outreach in your own words. The send button is locked until you edit it. Every response and referral, captured. A summary that travels with you.

Access funder materials and the working prototype ↗

How this looks in practice

Maria’s story.

Los Angeles. Single mother. Hospital food-services worker. Spanish-speaking. Her heat has been off for four months. The landlord is suing her for back rent in retaliation. He has a lawyer. She does not.

Honest triage

She types four sentences in Spanish. The app confirms: this is a civil housing matter with a possible retaliation pattern. She needs a lawyer, not a self-help form.

Party mapper

The landlord, the property manager, the LLC that owns the building. Adverse. The city housing inspector. Neutral. Formatted for an ABA conflicts check in minutes.

Attorney finder

The app surfaces a pro bono attorney with 47 landlord-tenant cases on record and Spanish fluency. Match reasons named honestly: real public case history, not invented win rates. Also surfaced: a legal-aid intake queue, a law-school housing clinic, and one self-help option if Maria wants to try that lane.

Outreach drafter

A first draft in Maria’s voice, in Spanish. She edits it. The send button stays locked until she does. That is not a bug. That is what makes an attorney trust the message.

Tracker

The attorney accepts. If she had said no, Bonne Foi would have moved to the next name on the list, carrying Maria’s summary forward, so she never had to start over. The intake wall does not reset with every rejection. It gets climbed once.

Vanessa in Atlanta is being sued by a debt buyer. Diana in Detroit has an active PPO and a custody hearing in 42 days. Different cases. Same five steps. Same intake wall, climbed once.

A generational leap

The bridge nobody built^™

The last generation of access-to-justice tools was built one integration at a time, per firm, per aid org, per grant. The wall between the person and the lawyer got taller with every new tool that was not built to talk to the others.

Bonne Foi^™ is built upstream of every legal system. One connector, and any AI-enabled firm, clinic, or legal-aid organization can pull a triaged matter on request. Build once & reach every system.

Starting with civil, where the need is largest. Expanding honestly into criminal, corporate, and administrative as each opens, and only when we can route each honestly.

This is what lets the same product serve a landlord-tenant case in Los Angeles, a debt-collection case in Atlanta, and a domestic-violence protective-order case in Detroit, without rebuilding for each.

For the tech folks

We call it the MCP layer for access to justice infrastructure. Think of it like a universal power outlet. Today every legal system has its own plug, so every partnership takes a one-off adapter. MCP is the standard plug. Build the outlet once, and any client of the protocol can pull a triaged matter on request.

In French, the word for outlet is prise, the same word we use for purchase. Grip. Hold. What connects you to the current. The founder’s father built the electrical infrastructure that powered homes and businesses starting with the South. She is building a different kind, starting with underserved communities.

Who plugs in

Firms with pro bono programs

AmLaw and mid-sized firms with active pro bono practices

LSC-funded legal-aid organizations

The 132 grantees carrying most of the civil-aid workload

Law-school clinics

Faculty-supervised, students on real matters

Court self-help centers

Increasingly digitized nationwide

Bar-association referral programs

Pro bono, modest means, lawyer referral

Solo & small firms

Contingency and limited-scope practices

These are the shapes of the plug we’re designing for. Specific case-management integrations follow the Phase 1 opinion. Build once & reach every system.

The Founding Partner & Lead Inventor

She is not a lawyer. She is an inventor who stumbled into this.

When she hit a complex, multi-party legal problem, she called firm after firm and got no calls back. So she taught herself, read the statutes, drafted her own documents, and built the tool she wished she had.

Pree Walia has a polymath temperament. Born in New Orleans and raised across the Deep South, she started in politics and community organizing, and has built across ventures ever since, driven by a deep purpose: improving the lives of the next generation and of underserved communities.

She is founder and CEO of Preemadonna, where she builds creative infrastructure for self-expression, starting with Nailbot, a device that prints any design onto a fingernail in seconds, and expanding into body art and beyond. She is the lead inventor on ten-plus utility patents across hardware, computer vision, and software. Before her venture, she spent formative years working in energy efficiency, building management, and clean tech (including LED lighting) at Silicon Valley startups, following her father into the infrastructure business before building a different kind of it herself. Her work returns to underrepresented communities every time: she cofounded Soorma Ventures to back founders the traditional funds overlook, served eight years on the board of MakerGirl teaching young women to build, is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at JumpStart where she scouts and supports the next generation of founders and entrepreneurial voices, and has prior training as a domestic violence counselor. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BA from Northwestern.

She runs at startup intensity and deliberately chose the nonprofit structure this problem requires, which is the whole reason the consumer side of legal stayed empty until now. She felt the pain point herself: civil and corporate matters all converging in eight months, and knew there had to be a better way.

Pree on LinkedIn →

System, method, and apparatus for scouting a lawyer

La balance de la bonne foi

Sous le pont

Under the bridge.

Bonne Foi’s roots are Louisiana. Our founder was born in New Orleans and raised predominantly across Louisiana and Mississippi. Her father studied at Louisiana Tech and Tulane, and helped build the electrical infrastructure that powered the South and key regions of the country. Pree’s extended family, growing up and still today, is spread across the South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia.

A note from Pree

Louisiana calls it gumbo. Everything in the pot, simmered slow, becomes something new. My dad’s favorite food to make was gumbo. Turns out I am one: Louisiana, Mississippi, Chicago higher ed, bindhis and bangles, California living, Shenzhen hardware, nail art robots, MakerGirl, LED lights, building automation. And there is more. This is just a snapshot. Messy on paper, but hypnotic jazz when you hear it :)

De bonne foi,

Pree

The seeds were planted a long time ago. Let me take you back. Original schoolhouse, live MC. Louisiana, 80s baby. A third daughter. Geriatric millennial, forty-three going on twenty-three.

Pree as a baby in Louisiana, held by her sisters and mother — Louisiana, 1980s baby. A third daughter. *Chez nous, avec mes sœurs et ma mère.* Mon père is the photographer, ma mère is the ageless beauty queen.

New Orleans, 2008. Rebuilding post Hurricane Katrina with Marlborough high school students, Habitat for Humanity.

New Orleans, 2009. UChicago Booth spring break, IDEA Village and social entrepreneurship.

Ahmedabad, 2010. Pree with an ice cream cone in front of a beauty contest audition sign. — Ahmedabad, 2010. Failed to submit a beauty audition form. Successfully devoured an ice cream cone.

Pree holding a next-generation LED two-by-two panel near her cubicle, 2011 — Silicon Valley, 2011. Pree’s (LED) energy source.

A hacked LED nail dryer, the first proof of concept for Nailbot, 2013 — San Francisco, 2013. Pree’s first Nailbot concept. A hacked LED nail dryer integrated into a Philips Hue smartbulb box.

Silicon Valley, 2015. Preemadonna booth at the Maker Faire. — Silicon Valley, 2015. Maker Faire. Grassroots Nailbot demos. Beauty maker school edition.

Silicon Valley, 2016. Nailbot x MakerGirl session at the Mountain View Library. — Silicon Valley, 2016. Nailbot × MakerGirl session at the Mountain View Library.

The why behind all of it

“There are pirates in it, and civil statutes too.”

The good faith, the eighteenth state, Grace O’Malley and the pelican, the whole arc of the principles we are named for, lives in the founder’s declaration. Get a coffee, maybe a beignet.

Read the declaration →

Pree Walia · LinkedIn ↗ · preewalia.com ↗

The eighteenth state kept the code. We keep the faith.

The first good faith act

New Orleans, LA.

Bonne foi is not an idea we invented. It is what a young man in New Orleans did one winter night, over fifty years ago, long before this company was named.

A father new to the city has a sick baby and no car. It is three in the morning. He opens the phone book to Punjabi last names and starts dialing. The first person who answers is a young engineer named Dev Walia. Without hesitating, he gets in his car, drives across the city, brings the family home, and the next morning helps track down their towed car.

Over fifty years later, the two families are one. NPR told the story in 2025.

The state motto is three words: Union, Justice, Confidence. We took the middle one to heart. We build here because this is chez nous, and because the eighteenth state kept the faith.

Bonne Foi is named for the principles he embodied with this act.

Listen to the NPR story Dev Walia is Pree’s father. NPR · My Unsung Hero · August 18, 2025

Le Golfe Sud

Where the hardest questions arrive first.

Land · Sea · Sky

Flooding that arrives every season. An eroding coastline losing a football field every hundred minutes. Electrical infrastructure running through the same vanishing marsh. The most culturally layered mix of people in the country.

The only intersection of civil and common law in the United States. What we learn here about people, infrastructure, and how we govern will travel, because the questions this region faces today are the questions the rest of the world will face tomorrow.

Read: Why the Gulf South →

The Ship’s Log

Built in the open. Cited where it counts.

Phase 1 is a twelve-week build with a small team, a working prototype, and a defined bar-ethics process. We will not ship the parts that need an opinion until the opinion is in hand.

Le Navire de la Bonne Foi. The ship, above her log.

Confirmed

MVP. Ping us for access.
Three reference scenarios. Housing, consumer debt, family/DV.
Diligence appendix. Public statistics, methodology, and program estimates.

In progress

V1 builds and workflow designs. Production architecture, intake flows, and MCP connector specifications.
Bar-ethics counsel. Seeking support to engage the right bar-ethics counsel for the Phase 1 opinion. Outreach features gated until it lands.
Founding advisory council. Recruiting six seats: litigation pro bono, legal aid, clinical, A2J, ethics, technology.
Formation. Bonne Foi is currently reserved as a nonprofit in the State of Louisiana. 501(c)(3) status and final entity structure are open questions we welcome anchor partner guidance on.

Coming

Phase 1 pilot. 12-24 week civil launch with anchor firm(s) and possibly one legal-aid partner.
MCP connector. First integration published for any AI-enabled firm, clinic, or aid org to consume.
Public benchmark. Anonymized outcome data as the A2J field’s open reference.

Letters of Marque

We are open to creative structures.

We are looking for anchor firms and organizations eager to partner with us and incubate^* Bonne Foi. Whether that means working directly with your pro bono team, integrating with your IT infrastructure, or helping shape the future of legal-tech workflows and product development, we want to find an innovative way to work together to create lasting change.

Share best practices. Accelerate access to justice. Build in a fast-paced environment.

The Gulf South is the most complex legal environment in the country. Louisiana runs civil law while every state around it runs common law, and a single matter after a single storm can cross both traditions, touch federal, state, and local policy, and involve a dozen parties across multiple jurisdictions. The attorneys who train on these matters will develop expertise in climate, environmental, energy, and regulatory law that the rest of the profession will spend the next decade trying to build. The firms that anchor here first will have something their competitors cannot replicate.

Partnership can take many forms

Office space at your firm. Design and QA collaboration on product launches. Customer discovery reviews. Conflict check software integration. Guidance navigating bar-ethics review.

Founder Disclosure

The polymath founder has submitted an application to Tulane’s Master of Jurisprudence program in Environmental and Energy Law. The program is flexible and has an online component, and will not distract the founder from her other ventures. This is a return, not a pivot: she was an early operator in energy efficiency, building management, and clean tech (including LED lighting) at Silicon Valley startups, following her father into the infrastructure business.

Potential collaborators, partners, anchor firms, and friends of Bonne Foi may find value in supporting the founder, her work and field of study, and integrating the founder as a special projects lead and resource for underrepresented regions and underserved communities, especially with legal and policy matters that she believes will emerge over the coming years and decades in the Gulf South related to land, air, and sea rights (see Declaration). The Gulf South offers anchor partners something no other geography can: complex, multi-party, multi-jurisdictional matters that span civil and common law, federal and state and local policy, and the practice areas that are growing fastest in the profession.

This is not a solicitation for personal support but a transparent disclosure by the Founder on her outside activities and background, made in bonne foi, as she would rather be open about her purpose, passions, and pursuits for the best alignment.

* Think of it as an Entrepreneur in Residence or an A2J Founder in Residence program. We use the word incubate to draw an analogy to the way startups scale quickly when embedded in an accelerator program or within a larger corporation’s innovation team initiatives, with supportive resources.

Start the conversation →

Infrastructure that accelerates access to justice for the underserved.

Purchase for everyone.

Two shores. One bridge.

We start with the fastest honest path to a lawyer.

Maria’s story.

The bridge nobody built^™

She is not a lawyer. She is an inventor who stumbled into this.

Under the bridge.

New Orleans, LA.

Where the hardest questions arrive first.

Built in the open. Cited where it counts.

We are open to creative structures.

Purchase for everyone.

Two shores. One bridge.

We start with the fastest honest path to a lawyer.

Maria’s story.

The bridge nobody built™

She is not a lawyer. She is an inventor who stumbled into this.

Under the bridge.

New Orleans, LA.

Where the hardest questions arrive first.

Built in the open. Cited where it counts.

We are open to creative structures.

We will send updates when there is something real to share.

Thank you.

The bridge nobody built^™