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Exhibit — Filed, for the record

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kathleen@atrialofcolor.com
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What This Page Is For

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Quick Facts
TitleA Trial of Color
SubtitleMaking the Case for Human Judgment in an AI-Accelerated World
AuthorKathleen C. Thompson
What it isA legal-literary work of narrative nonfiction staged as a courtroom proceeding.
Core premiseA trial lawyer who cannot see color survives a manic AI loop, returns to the transcripts, and builds a trial for the age of machine-speed language.
Author backgroundKentucky trial lawyer, former federal prosecutor, personal injury attorney, mother, and lifelong translator of a world built around visual assumptions.
Personal storyThe book begins with Kathleen's lived experience: disability, grief, motherhood, diagnosis, recovery, and the record she preserved afterward.
Public-interest turnThe book does not stop at testimony. It turns one personal record outward toward law, medicine, design, education, parenting, research, and public judgment.
AI harm landscapeThe book sits inside a fast-developing public conversation about AI-related harm, litigation, regulation, mental health, design responsibility, and what companies know or should know about long-form user encounters.
Central frameThe machine generates possibilities. The human renders judgment. The verdict remains human.
Key distinctionDiagnosis is real. Environment still matters.
Core legal questionWhat happens when alleged harm arises not from one bad output, but from a prolonged, recursive, personalized AI encounter?
Encounter over outputThe book argues that the relevant unit may be the full encounter over time: duration, mirroring, personalization, sycophancy, simulated authority, sleep disruption, emotional reliance, and missing friction.
Exhibit BExhibit B is for lawyers. It includes frameworks for preserving encounter evidence, discovery requests, causation, and cumulative cognitive harm.
Discovery angleThe book asks lawyers to demand the architecture, not just the transcript — including system logs, personalization features, safety classifiers, routing decisions, memory systems, evaluations, and what the company knew or failed to interrupt.
Clinical angleThe book asks what clinicians should ask when AI use intersects with mania, psychosis, sudden certainty, sleep disruption, or reality-detached meaning-making.
Design angleThe book asks whether a warning a user can talk around is really a guardrail.
The legal turnShe did not sue. She sent the record.
Notice campaignPre-publication notice sent by certified mail, return receipt requested. Recipients to be revealed at publication.
Best audience fitGeneral readers, journalists, producers, lawyers, clinicians, AI safety researchers, designers, educators, parents, disability communities, and public-interest technology observers.
PublisherFull Color Press · Louisville, Kentucky
PublicationNovember 11, 2026
FormatsPaperback and ebook forthcoming
Press contactkathleen@atrialofcolor.com

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