About

A few years into litigation practice, I was working a complex case. Pile of documents, dense facts, multiple parties. To make sense of it, we started building visuals — timelines, relationship diagrams, overviews.

At the hearing, we presented the case using those visuals. Clear structure, easy to follow. The opposing party went old school: text-heavy, traditional pleading. Halfway through their argument, the judge interrupted. Pointed at our diagram and asked: "Where are we in the picture?"

That moment stuck. A visual made in a few hours had become the shared reference point for the entire courtroom. The judge thought in pictures. So did everyone else — they just didn't have them. That was the start of Patroon.

What started as courtroom visuals has grown into something broader. The problem was never just "make it visual" — it's that legal work produces mountains of complexity, and the tools to manage it haven't kept up.

For the first years, we were consultants. Good ones — but consultants. We'd deliver assets, hand them over, move on. Clients started asking for more. Not just deliverables, but systems. Frameworks they could use without us. Tools that lived inside their environments.

In 2021, Dielis joined. Engineer, builder, someone who thought in code the way I thought in legal structures. Suddenly we could say yes to those requests. We started building design systems, interactive compliance tools, AI applications — things that integrate technically, not just visually. That shift changed everything.

Now we build what's needed. AI applications that surface what matters in thousands of documents. Interactive dashboards for compliance teams. Contracts people actually read. Litigation visuals that win cases.

We're a small team — lawyers, designers, engineers, all in-house. No outsourced dev work, no handoffs between disciplines. Dielis and Vlad handle engineering. Joost and Ravenna lead design. Three of us have legal training. When projects need more hands, we scale — but the core thinking stays in-house.

We ship our own products too: Feitlijn (case law analysis, nearly 1,000 users) and Thea (document-to-timeline in minutes). Both built from scratch by this team.