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About

Hi. Here’s who’s behind this.

Open The House is a pro bono legal service of John N. Phillips, Esq., B.S., J.D. No one pays for it: not the Legal Opinion, not the spec, not the simulations.

Who John is

John is a Washington State attorney (WSBA No. 54962) and the founder of Broadview Family Law, a family law practice serving King and Snohomish Counties. Before law school he spent eleven years as a software engineer, in healthcare technology mostly. He has a B.S. in Computer Science Engineering from Ohio State and a J.D., summa cum laude, from the University of Akron School of Law.

How this started

In 2017, as a law student, John wrote a paper asking a simple question: the Constitution allows one Representative for every 30,000 people, so why does the House still have 435? And if the answer is that a room can’t hold ten thousand people, can software do what the room can’t? That paper, A Blockchain Greenfield for Cato, is where Open The House began.

Since then it has grown into an open spec any team can build, a design council and simulated sessions that test it, and a Legal Opinion on the law of the House’s size, which also corrects a few things the original paper got wrong.

How it’s made

John directs the project. The design council, the simulations and much of the writing are produced with Claude, an AI model, and the site says so wherever it matters: every stakeholder and every voice in the simulations is simulated.

The fine print

Pro bono means John isn’t paid for this work. Nothing on this site is legal advice, and reading it doesn’t make anyone John’s client. If you need a lawyer, talk to one licensed where you live.

Find John

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