The $750,000 Heist

It started with a phone call from a friend. He was sitting in a lawyer’s office, staring at a wall.

“They’re telling me I might lose it all,” he said.

Five years ago, he entered his marriage with $750,000—an inheritance from his father. He kept it in what he thought was a safe place. But over half a decade of life, joint accounts, mortgage payments, and “just one quick transfer,” that $750k had become a ghost. It was buried under 15,000 transactions, three different banks, and a cloud of legal “commingling” theory.

His wife’s lawyers were blunt: Prove it’s yours, or it’s half hers.

The price tag for that proof? $15,000 and 6 weeks of waiting for a forensic accountant to manually “trace” the funds.

I sat there thinking: This isn’t law. This is a shakedown.

The Realization: Financial Asymmetry

In high-stakes litigation, whoever controls the data controls the outcome. If you have the keys to the bank portal, you can bury your spouse in a mountain of unstructured PDFs and wait for them to run out of money trying to dig through them.

The “system” doesn’t want you to find the truth; it wants you to settle because the truth is too expensive to calculate.

I realized that forensic accounting isn’t magic. It’s just a set of deterministic math rules applied to a ledger. The most important one is the Lowest Intermediate Balance Rule (LIBR). Every divorce lawyer in the US knows it—it’s based on the California Supreme Court precedent See v. See (1966)—but almost nobody has automated it.

So, I decided to spend my weekends building a weapon for the “out-spouse.”

The Prototype: 3 AM and a Mountain of PDFs

I didn’t want to build a “budgeting app.” I wanted to build a forensic microscope.

The first challenge was the data itself. Bank statements aren’t “data”—they are visual chaos. Scanned PDFs from 2019, blurry mobile uploads, coffee stains on pages. Generic OCR fails instantly.

I built a pipeline using Mistral’s Vision models and Gemini 2.0 to ingest this chaos. Instead of just reading text, the AI investigates the intent. It flags the “Rivian purchase” as a hidden asset and the “MGM Grand ATM withdrawal” as a waste of marital funds.

Once the data was structured, I coded the LIBR algorithm. It’s a vicious bit of logic: it replays the account history second-by-second. If the account balance ever drops below your separate property amount, that property is mathematically destroyed.

I got the runtime down from 6 weeks to 180 seconds.

The Breakthrough: Admissible Math

I knew that the reports had to be more than just “charts.” They had to be ammunition.

I integrated SHA-256 integrity hashing for every upload. This creates a cryptographically verified chain of custody. When opposing counsel says, “How do we know he didn’t doctor these results?”, you point to the hash. You point to a deterministic algorithm that yields the same result every single time.

You don’t fight a lawyer with more lawyers. You fight them with irrefutable math.

The Machine: From Tool to Appliance

What started as a script for a friend evolved into Exit Protocol.

To make it truly “defense-grade,” I built the Sovereign Edition. It’s a fully containerized Docker appliance designed for Enterprise Law Firms. They can run it on-prem, ensuring that sensitive PII never leaves their secure infrastructure.

For the individual litigant, we built Audit Express. A flat-fee, high-throughput portal where you upload your “unstructured nightmare” and get a court-ready forensic report before your coffee gets cold.

Technical Real Talk (The Stack)

This wasn’t built on “vibes.” It was built on:

  • Django & Postgres: Because legal data demands integrity.
  • Celery & Redis: To crunch 10,000+ transactions without locking the main thread.
  • Fernet (AES-128 CBC): Because evidence must be encrypted at rest.
  • Mistral OCR Pipeline: Turning “banking chaos” into SQL reality.

The Mission

Justice shouldn’t have a $15,000 cover charge.

I built Exit Protocol because financial abuse in divorce is an epidemic that thrives in the dark. By automating the math of the legal system, we’ve shifted the leverage back to the people who just want what is rightfully theirs.

The problem was a $750,000 heist.
The solution is 180 seconds of code.

View the project: ExitProtocols.com

Version 2.0 - Built for the moment you need proof.
Sovereign Mode available for Enterprise Law Firms.