These are the tools I wish I'd had.
I've spent years in litigation support — and still do — often working late nights, doing the kind of work that should have had a tool — and didn't. Fixing production load files by hand. Cleaning up vendor work that arrived out of spec. Writing scripts and C code because nothing in our toolbox could solve the problems we had. A lot of managers don't want to pay for the tools their teams actually need. So people end up doing things the hard way. The hard way takes longer, produces mistakes nobody asked for, and quietly steals weekends from the people who do the work. It bothered me then. It still does. So I built tools. HashtagLegal is the result. The tools cover the work I used to do — and watched everyone around me do — by hand: chat data that arrived as JSON nobody could read; productions that needed to be fixed before loading for review; and load-file work that didn't have automated auditing and correction. Each one solves a problem I lived with, sometimes for years. Most of them are paid. I have to make a living, same as everyone else. One of them — AdminPro — is free, as a thank-you to the eDiscovery community that helped me get where I am. A mix of some free and some paid feels like a fair balance. If you've ever stared at a 10,000-page PDF or written the same Excel formula a third time wondering why this isn't already a tool, you're in the right place. — Nick