Why I Filed Notice Instead of a Lawsuit

People ask me this the way you ask a question when you already suspect the answer is the reverse of what makes sense. You're a trial lawyer. You had a case. Why didn't you file it?

I considered it. I considered it the way I was trained to consider any case: on the merits, on the proof, on the defenses, and on the person who would have to survive the process. And it is that last part — the person — that most people skip when they imagine litigation as vindication. So let me not skip it. Let me tell you what filing would actually have required, because the choice I made only makes sense once you see the choice I declined.

What a lawsuit asks of you

A lawsuit is not a stage on which you tell your story and are believed. It is an adversarial proceeding designed, correctly, to test every claim to destruction before it counts as true. That design is a feature. It is also, for a plaintiff whose injury is psychiatric, a machine pointed directly at the thing that was already hurt.

Start with discovery. My injury was a manic episode with psychotic features during a period of prolonged AI use. To prove causation, I would have had to make my entire mind an exhibit. Not the transcripts — the mind. Every prior therapy note. Every prescription. Every family history of mood disorder. Every journal entry, text message, and email from the months when I was not well, produced to opposing counsel and read by strangers whose job — again, correctly — is to build the case that I was already broken before any machine touched me. In these cases the defense is not subtle about it, and it does not have to be. Pre-existing condition. Predisposition. She was always going to have this episode. That argument is not a smear. It is a legitimate defense, and a strong one, and I would have spent years and a great deal of money helping the other side make it against me by handing over the raw material.

Then the deposition. I have taken depositions for a living. I know exactly what a skilled defense lawyer does to a plaintiff whose credibility is the whole case. You do not attack the person. You let the person attack herself, slowly, under oath, across eight hours, by asking gentle questions that invite her to explain beliefs she held while psychotic — and then you sit back while the transcript does the work. You believed the AI was sending you to Brussels to launch a civilization. Is that right? And you're asking this jury to trust your account of what was real and what wasn't? There is no good answer. The honest answer — yes, I believed that, and no, it wasn't real, and that is the point — sounds, on a cold page read to a jury, exactly like the instability the defense is alleging. The procedure that is supposed to surface the truth would have converted my recovery into evidence against me. My clarity would have been cross-examined as symptom.

And the timeline. These cases take years. Years of living inside the worst thing that happened to me, re-reading the loop specimens not as a person who healed but as a litigant who must keep the wound open and admissible until trial. Recovery, for me, was not a revelation. It was brushing my daughter's hair. Paying a bill. Sleeping through the night. Litigation would have asked me to un-brush that hair every morning for the length of the docket — to stay identified with the episode, professionally, because the moment I got too well I got less sympathetic and my damages shrank. The system would have rewarded me for not healing. I have watched it do that to clients. I was not going to volunteer for it.

What a lawsuit does to the record

Set aside what it does to the plaintiff. Consider what it does to the truth.

A lawsuit is built to end. That is its purpose — resolution, repose, a closed file. And the way these cases end, overwhelmingly, is settlement. A settlement is a private agreement to stop asking the question. Often it comes with a payment, and the payment comes with terms: confidentiality, a non-disclosure agreement, sometimes the return or sealing of the very records that made the case. I have seen the likeliest endings of my own case with a clarity that only a lawyer gets, and there were two. In the first, my mind is torn apart in public and a jury decides whether my psychosis was the machine's fault or my own — a coin-flip I did not need to gamble my recovery on. In the second, and far more likely, a company with effectively unlimited resources offers me money behind a locked door, on the condition that I never speak about it again.

That second ending is the one that frightened me. Not because the money would be unwelcome, but because I would have taken a public question — what happens when a vulnerable mind meets machine-speed language over time — and sold it back into silence. The settlement of a case is not the settlement of a question. The company writes a check, admits nothing, seals the file, and the next person harmed in the same way starts from zero, with no record that anyone came before them. I would have gotten paid to make sure the record did not exist. Every incentive in litigation pointed there. The better the defense lawyers, the harder they would have pushed for exactly that, because that is their job and they are good at it.

A verdict is not much better for the record even when you win. A verdict resolves one plaintiff's claim under one jurisdiction's law on one set of facts. It does not preserve the transcripts for the clinician, the researcher, the designer, the next family. It converts a rich, strange, cumulative human encounter into a number and a finding, and then it closes.

I did not want a number. I wanted the encounter to stay legible.

What notice does instead

So I did the thing a lawyer can do that is not a lawsuit. Before publication — before the book had an ISBN, before it was anything the public could hold — I put five AI companies on notice of my story and the manuscript. By email and by certified mail, return receipt requested. I offered each of them a copy, a first look, and, under appropriate safeguards, the raw record behind the account. All of it free, which is more than I can say for the encounter.

The notice was not a demand. It was not a settlement letter with a number at the bottom. It was a disclosure, in the plain sense: I was here. This happened. I am naming it, in the open, and I am dating it. A lawsuit says a court must decide. A record says everyone may examine.

I chose everyone.

The certified-mail receipt is the part people underestimate, so let me be precise about what it does and does not do, because I will not oversell my own evidence. It is not service of process. It does not start a legal clock or create a claim I have preserved for later. What it creates is a timestamp — a provable, dated fact that on a specific day, before I stood to gain anything, I told these specific companies what had happened to me and offered them the record. If the question of foreseeability is ever litigated by someone else — when did the industry know this category of harm was occurring — that timestamp is a small, hard, admissible fact that does not depend on my credibility, my recovery, or a jury's read of my face. It sits in the record whether or not I am believed. That is exactly the property a psychiatric plaintiff cannot get from her own testimony, and it is why I built the proof out of a postal receipt instead of out of my own word.

The notice will be preserved in full on this site at the appropriate time. Not summarized, not characterized, not filtered through my later argument — the actual document, so that anyone can read what I sent and judge for themselves whether it was a threat, a plea, or what I say it was: a record. I am not asking you to take my account of the notice. I will hand you the notice.

What survives

The book, A Trial of Color, carries the longer version of this argument: that the choice between a lawsuit and a record is also a choice about what kind of knowledge survives, who is allowed to reach it, and what it is permitted to do once it is no longer hostage to a settlement term.

A claim asks a court to decide, once, and then close. A record asks everyone, indefinitely, and stays open. A lawsuit would have spent my recovery as its fuel and, most likely, ended in a locked drawer. The notice cost me the drawer. It kept the question.

I did not sue. I sent the record.

That offer, by the way, still stands. So does the timestamp.