John MacGillis
I build tools that make public data useful.
Nova Scotia's court decisions, legislative debates, and docket schedules — indexed, searchable, and free.
Bad design is not neutral. It protects the institutions that can afford to ignore it, and punishes everyone else.
When a court docket is an Oracle-generated PDF emailed to a mailing list, or 30 years of legislative debate is buried in early-2000s HTML, or case law sits behind a paywall — the friction is the point. Public records that the public can't actually use aren't public in any way that matters.
NS Legal Research
LiveFree AI-powered legal research platform for Nova Scotia lawyers. A public alternative to commercial tools that every lawyer in the province can use, regardless of firm size or budget.
Court Docket Tracker
Coming soonSearchable index of NS court schedules. Party names, lawyers, matter types, self-representation tracking.
NS Hansard Search
LiveWhat does your MLA actually do? Search 1.7M words of legislative debate. MLA report cards, quality scoring, absurdity flags.
Background
I trained as a journalist at Carleton University and have written for The Walrus and Financial Post. I spent two years inside the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society working across communications, process automation, and regulatory modernization with teams across the organization.
Now I work at a regional law firm, where I split my time between growth strategy and building internal tools — workflow automation, document generation, and system integrations that replaced most of the manual work across the practice.
What drives this work
I spent enough time inside institutions — a legal regulator, a law firm, newsrooms — to see how information asymmetry works in practice. The data exists. The interfaces don't.
Someone looking up whether their landlord has been sued before shouldn't need a Westlaw subscription. A journalist covering the legislature shouldn't have to read HTML from 2003. The problem isn't access — it's design.