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About
A law practice that became a laboratory.
Proprietary Legal Intelligence grew out of one trial lawyer’s decision to learn frontier AI deeply enough to trust it with real work — and to build the checks that make that trust reasonable.
The founder
Nick Mermiges, Esq.
- Practice
- Trial lawyer, more than eleven years
- Focus
- Civil litigation, civil trials and appeals, complex and expert discovery, family law
- Law school
- University of Miami School of Law — top 5% of his class, Law Review, Order of the Coif
- Undergraduate
- University of Michigan
- Based
- Columbia, South Carolina
Nick Mermiges tries cases. For more than eleven years he has handled civil litigation, civil trials and appeals, and family-court matters in South Carolina — the document-heavy disputes where discovery, experts, and the record decide outcomes.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, he went on to finish in the top 5% of his class at the University of Miami School of Law, where he served on the Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif.
When frontier models became genuinely capable, he did not hand his files to a chatbot. He built a system around the models instead: recurring work decomposed into narrow stages, retrieval over years of his own work product, deterministic document assembly, and separate fact-check gates that fail loudly rather than guess. Frontier and open-weight models each do the jobs they are suited to. A lawyer reviews every output. That system runs on live matters in his practice today.
Proprietary Legal Intelligence exists to build the same class of system for other legal organizations, and PLI Labs publishes the underlying research in the open.
In the courtroom
“[T]hink of him as Lebron James in the courtroom.”
Andrea S. · client
“Nick provided me the best trial record of my 30-year career.”
Gregory F. · appellate counsel who took over one of his cases
“He made the opposing lawyer look like a rookie in the courtroom.”
Jeremy G. · client
“Nick is a dog on a bone.”
Chris C. · client
Verbatim excerpts from public Google reviews of Mr. Mermiges’s law practice. They describe his work as a lawyer, not the services of Proprietary Legal Intelligence. Every matter turns on its own facts, and prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
How it came about
From a litigation practice to a company.
- 01 · The moment
Hours of work, in minutes
A frontier model produced, almost instantly, work that would have taken a long afternoon. Impressive and unsettling. The decision was to learn it deeply rather than be displaced by it — on one condition: AI would be used only where its work could be checked.
- 02 · The build
A harness, not a chatbot
Recurring legal work decomposed into narrow, verifiable steps; drafts grounded in years of the firm’s own filings; final documents assembled by code; separate checks that stop the build when the record doesn’t support a statement.
- 03 · The talk
Engineers asked how it worked
A post about the home-office inference hardware drew engineers from a major legal research company, who asked for a two-hour technical talk. Their questions made the case that lawyers and engineers were each missing half the picture.
- 04 · The company
Proprietary Legal Intelligence
Founded in 2026 to build the same class of system for other legal organizations — and, through PLI Labs, to publish the research so anyone can verify it.
Principles
What we hold to.
- 01
The lawyer stays in the chair
Machines assemble, retrieve, and draft. Lawyers decide. Every workflow ends in attorney review.
- 02
Show the source
Every factual statement should trace to the page it came from. If it can’t, it is flagged, not shipped.
- 03
Fail loudly
A system that guesses silently is worse than none. Ours stop and say why when they cannot verify.
- 04
Plain claims
We don’t promise what no architecture can deliver — including guarantees about confidentiality, privilege, or compliance.
- 05
No lock-in
The workflows, evaluation sets, and documentation are yours, and the system is portable across model vendors.
At a glance
The company in brief
- Company
- Proprietary Legal Intelligence LLC, founded 2026
- Founder
- Nick Mermiges, Esq.
- Two arms
- Consulting — AI systems for legal organizations. PLI Labs — open legal model research and tools.
- Office
- 1720 Main Street, Suite 202, Columbia, SC 29201
- Online
- ProprietaryLegal.com · GitHub · Hugging Face