Track Explorer
Find the Right Starting Point
NLI’s 26 tracks are stages and specialties within three connected practices. They are not isolated products, and a matter may use more than one track under one or more written scopes.
Is your immediate problem a dispute, an institution, or the architecture of continuing cooperation?
Choose Adjudicative Architecture for a matter that must be decided, Lawfare for an institution that must learn or change, and Settlement Services for cooperation that must be restored or designed.
Use the summaries below to identify a likely starting point. Final fit depends on record, urgency, forum, professional requirements, complexity, and capacity.
Adjudicative Architecture
Engineering Better Decisions
A1
Pre-Counsel Architecture
Use when: A dispute is forming and statements, pleadings, deadlines, or institutional momentum have not yet hardened the record.
Objective: Preserve options, organize the first record, identify immediate risks, and prepare responsible counsel or forum engagement.
A2
Case Blueprint
Use when: An existing matter has records and activity but lacks one coherent decisional structure.
Objective: Compress chronology, actors, authority, predicates, governing questions, remedy, and review posture into a usable blueprint.
A3
Evidence Architecture
Use when: Custody, admissibility, sequence, missing records, witnesses, or proof prevents responsible decision.
Objective: Establish what the record warrants, what remains missing, and what must survive adversarial examination.
A4
Filing Architecture
Use when: The matter must become a motion, memorandum, complaint, notice, proposed order, agency submission, or other authorized filing.
Objective: Make the governing question, record, authority, relief, and preservation requirements usable by counsel or the responsible filer.
A5
Hearing Architecture
Use when: A hearing, argument, examination, administrative event, or decisional meeting requires structured questions and decision points.
Objective: Organize sequence, record references, questions, objections, relief, and closure conditions.
A6
Review Architecture
Use when: An order, ruling, or institutional decision must be evaluated, preserved, challenged, or clarified.
Objective: Identify unresolved controlling questions, standards of review, preservation gaps, and the correction path.
A7
Resolution Architecture
Use when: Judgment, settlement, implementation, restitution, enforcement, or recurrence prevention must be connected.
Objective: Convert a legal or negotiated result into durable closure rather than file closure alone.
A8
Supreme Court Review Architecture
Use when: A question must remain readable and viable through appellate and Supreme Court review.
Objective: Preserve and present the record, question, posture, and institutional significance required by the reviewing court.
A9
Strategic Amicus Architecture
Use when: A court would benefit from disciplined nonparty analysis beyond party advocacy.
Objective: Clarify the bounded question, record, authority, rule, remedy, and institutional consequence without duplicating party briefing.
Lawfare
Engineering Better Institutions
L1
Campaign Blueprint
Use when: A documented institutional failure requires coordinated work across forums, actors, records, and time.
Objective: Define the failure, lawful purpose, record, authority, participants, sequence, boundaries, and settlement conditions.
L2
Agency Architecture
Use when: Administrative records, authority, deference, review, accountability, or correction are central.
Objective: Organize the agency process and external review path around lawful authority, record, and remedy.
L3
Legislative Architecture
Use when: A documented failure requires a bounded statutory or legislative correction.
Objective: Translate evidence and institutional constraints into implementable law.
L4
Public Accountability
Use when: Public records, duties, discrepancies, and correction demands must become understandable and reviewable.
Objective: Produce truthful accountability without substituting publicity for proof.
L5
Coalition Architecture
Use when: Multiple participants require coherent roles, information, decision rights, communication, and shared objectives.
Objective: Make cooperation persistent without losing accountability or record integrity.
L6
Institutional Reform
Use when: Recurring failure arises from roles, procedures, incentives, records, standards, review, or succession.
Objective: Repair the formal reciprocal architecture rather than merely replace individual actors.
L7
Long-Haul Constitutional Campaigns
Use when: Correction requires sustained judicial, legislative, administrative, educational, and public work.
Objective: Preserve evidence, questions, participants, legitimacy, and continuity across a long horizon.
L8
Policy and Legislative Architecture
Use when: Institutions need a complete policy architecture connecting evidence, authority, affected interests, implementation, and review.
Objective: Create policy that can operate in reality and remain accountable to its purpose.
L9
Political Platform Architecture
Use when: A governance program requires coherent, evidence-based policy and institutional design.
Objective: Translate documented problems and corrections into a reviewable governing platform.
L3 and L8 require final differentiation. L9 requires separate legal, political-activity, tax, sponsorship, and ethical review before engagement.
Settlement Services
Engineering Better Cooperation
S1
Private Settlement
Use when: Private parties seek a complete and implementable resolution outside or alongside litigation.
Objective: Connect facts, interests, duties, reciprocal terms, remedy, enforcement, and recurrence prevention.
S2
Family Settlement
Use when: Family conflict implicates care, property, contribution, boundaries, succession, separation, or continuing relationships.
Objective: Organize durable terms with required legal, financial, therapeutic, or mediation professionals.
S3
Organizational Settlement
Use when: Internal conflict arises from unclear roles, authority, records, incentives, accountability, or mission.
Objective: Resolve the conflict and repair the organization that produced it.
S4
Political Settlement
Use when: Political actors or constituencies require reciprocal terms, boundaries, implementation, and review.
Objective: Replace recurring coercive conflict with explicit and durable cooperative architecture where possible.
S5
Community Settlement
Use when: Shared resources, norms, institutions, externalities, or governance create community-level conflict.
Objective: Establish a common record, affected interests, duties, decision rights, remedy, and recurrence prevention.
S6
Civilizational Design
Use when: Research or long-horizon work concerns constitutional, cultural, economic, legal, and cooperative continuity.
Objective: Develop and test architectures for transgenerational order.
S7
Reciprocity & Restitution
Use when: Injury, responsibility, externalized costs, restoration, proportionality, and future constraint must be connected.
Objective: Produce restoration and consequence sufficient to support renewed or safely terminated cooperation.
S8
Founding & Stewardship Documentation
Use when: A family, organization, institution, or enterprise needs durable founding and governance records.
Objective: Organize purpose, ownership, authority, contribution, reciprocity, succession, and separation.
S6 is research-sensitive. Public scope must remain proportional to demonstrated evidence and capacity.
Returning Clients: Legacy Track Crosswalk
The former Track 0–7 structure has been reorganized:
| Former track | New location |
|---|---|
| Track 0 — Pre-Record Strategy | A1 Pre-Counsel Architecture |
| Track 1 — Case Blueprint | A2 Case Blueprint |
| Track 2 — Filing Package | A4 Filing Architecture and A9 Strategic Amicus |
| Track 3 — Campaign Support | L1–L6, with extended L7–L9 work where approved |
| Track 4 — Counsel & Client Support | Ongoing support across A3, A5, A6, and A7 |
| Track 5 — Supreme Court Continuity | A6 Review and A8 Supreme Court Review |
| Track 6 — Advisory Retainer | Engagement model across practices |
| Track 7 — Attorney & Firm Support | Counsel-facing delivery across A1–A9 |
Pricing and Scope
Tracks define the kind of work. A written scope defines the actual relationship.
Fees depend on record volume, urgency, number of parties, forum, professional coordination, public sensitivity, deliverables, and review posture. Published estimates are not fixed quotes unless the written scope says otherwise.