/toolkit (or /accountability-kit)This is the copy for the toolkit’s main landing page on achatwithai.com. Adapt structurally to your CMS / template. The intent is to make the page feel like a serious civic resource, not a personal blog post.
The Family Court Accountability Toolkit
A set of templates, model legislation, and outreach materials for citizens, journalists, and researchers who want to make American family courts subject to the same baseline transparency norms that govern every other publicly funded institution.
Open on a clear framing block — short, plain, no marketing voice.
The American family court system decides custody, visitation, and child support in tens of thousands of cases every year. It publishes essentially no performance data. Unlike federal courts, public schools, hospitals, or any other major publicly funded institution, family court operates outside the empirical scrutiny that governs the rest of public life.
This toolkit exists to change that — through ordinary public records law, ordinary legislation, and ordinary investigative journalism. Nothing here is novel. The same accountability mechanisms that govern every other corner of state government are being applied here, for the first time, at scale.
The materials are free to use, free to adapt, and designed to be picked up and run with locally — in your state, with your representative, with your local press.
Render this as a distinct callout — not a small footer note. It needs to be impossible to miss.
Before you download anything — please read this
If you are currently in a family court matter — a contested custody case, a child support enforcement action, a modification proceeding, a contempt action — please do not use these materials as litigation tools.
They are designed for structural reform: published data, model legislation, investigative reporting on patterns. Using them as part of an active case will hurt your case and hurt the broader effort.
Three downloadable, adaptable resources. Each works on its own; together they form a sequence.
The foundation. A template letter, target-agency map, state-specific notes, and a denial-response playbook for requesting the family court administrative data the system has not published. Designed to be used in any state, by anyone, without legal training.
Read on the web → · Download PDF →
A specific, narrow, defensible piece of legislation that any state legislator can introduce. The bill requires the state’s family court system to publish performance data the way every other publicly funded institution already does. Includes a leave-behind one-pager, an initial email to a legislator, and talking points for in-person meetings.
Read on the web → · Download PDF →
A media one-pager, pitch email template, and guidance for bringing the family court accountability story to reporters in your region. Designed for local advocacy networks and individual citizens with media contacts.
Read on the web → · Download PDF →
The instinct most reform efforts get wrong is pitching journalists and legislators before having data. The result is a flurry of attention that produces no follow-through, after which the story is “old news” and the doors close.
The sequence that works:
This is a multi-year project. Reform on family court accountability is realistically a 5–10 year effort in any given state. The transparency bill is year one. The downstream reforms — guardian ad litem certification, immunity reform, child support enforcement restructuring — come later, supported by the data that the first bill produces.
Two long-form articles lay out the structural argument that this toolkit operationalizes:
If you are new to this argument, read the family court piece first. The toolkit makes more sense as the natural next step from the structural critique that piece presents.
If you use this toolkit, the project benefits from knowing what you found.
[An intake form will live here, once Patrick has built it. Below is the suggested copy.]
Tell us what you did. If you sent a public records request, contacted a legislator, or pitched a reporter using these materials, share what happened. Anonymized contributions help build the cross-state record that the next round of reform depends on.
(Form fields: state, date of action, type of action [public records request / legislator contact / journalist pitch / other], target agency or person [optional], outcome [received records / received refusal / no response / meeting taken / story published / other], any documents or notes you’re willing to share, your name and email [optional, for follow-up].)
[Suggested feature for a later phase: a public-facing dashboard showing aggregated, anonymized contributions from toolkit users — number of records requests sent by state, response rates, refusal patterns, legislators approached, journalists pitched. The dashboard becomes the empirical evidence the toolkit is producing real movement, and is itself publishable as a story.]
Reform that wins is calm, evidence-based, and structural. Reform that loses is angry, personal, and case-specific.
The materials in this toolkit are written in the first register on purpose. If you adapt them, please keep them there. Anything that reads as a personal vendetta — even when the underlying grievance is justified — gives the opposition exactly what it needs to dismiss the entire effort. The system this toolkit is aimed at has spent a century being insulated from honest measurement. The insulation is held in place by institutional incentives and statutory immunity, not by individual bad actors. Aim at the structure.
These materials are made available under a permissive license — adapt them, redistribute them, build on them. Attribution back to achatwithai.com is appreciated but not required. The goal is for these to spread.
A few things to consider when you build this page:
Page structure suggestions:
Routes I’d suggest:
/toolkit/ — landing page (this copy)/toolkit/use-policy/ — the use policy as a standalone page/toolkit/public-records/ — the public records template as a web page/toolkit/model-bill/ — the bill proposal as a web page/toolkit/journalist-toolkit/ — the journalist materials as a web page/toolkit/contribute/ — the intake form (when built)Analytics to track from launch:
Things to add later, in this order: