Rhetoric started as a question that wouldn't go away: what if lawyers had a text editor that understood their work the way a code editor understands code? After a decade of thinking about it, we decided to build it.
A code editor knows what a function is. Rhetoric knows what a citation is — and the brief structure, formatting rules, and court conventions that surround it.
We're not adding legal features to a general-purpose editor. We started from the brief and built outward — citation tracking, Bluebook formatting, case research — so the tool understands your work the way you do.
Most editors start from characters and paragraphs. Rhetoric starts from order — the structure of a legal argument and the rules that govern how it's presented.
When you insert a citation, Rhetoric knows it's a citation. Move a paragraph, and short forms and id. references update themselves. This isn't a plugin on top of a word processor — it's a text editor that was built to think in legal constructs from the ground up.
Mustafa has a J.D. from NYU law school. He practiced law at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP and DLA Piper before switching to software where he has worked on Alexa for Amazon and at Bench IQ.
Hamza is the former V.P. of Product and Engineering at Backpack and has been married to a lawyer for 10 years.