ClaimData Is Now Affiant

Today we're changing our name. ClaimData is now Affiant.

Same team. Same product. Same firms and clients we work with every day. A new name that reflects a broader vision for what we're building, and re-centers the clients we've always served.

This post explains the change: what Affiant means, why we chose it, the practice areas it reflects, and the category we're building.

What the name means

An affiant is the person who makes a sworn statement of fact. Across every area of law, the affiant is the one whose firsthand account carries evidentiary weight: the one who lived what happened and can speak to it directly.

That word names what we've been building from day one. Our product puts a documentation instrument directly in the client's hands and captures their experience as it unfolds: the pain, the disruption, the missed moments, the daily texture of a life shaped by a legal situation. Over weeks and months, that record becomes evidence no medical file, HR folder, or agency chronology can produce. The person at the center of the case is the person producing it.

ClaimData served us well when we started. It pointed at the output (data) and at one set of practice areas (claims). Affiant points at the person. And the person is the point.

The name is practice-area-agnostic and rooted in real legal vocabulary. Every attorney in every discipline knows what an affiant is. It carries a gravity that matches the seriousness of what clients are going through, without being clinical or alienating.

Broadening what we serve

When we launched, our customers practiced personal injury, Social Security disability, short-term and long-term disability, VA benefits, and workers' comp. Those are the areas where the client-impact evidence gap is most visible, and those firms are the ones who taught us how to close it. We will keep serving them, and we will keep building deeply for their work.

But as we have grown, something has become clear. The evidence gap isn't an injury problem, or a disability problem. It's a legal practice problem. Any case whose outcome depends on proving what happened to a real person in their daily life has the same gap, and the same opportunity to close it.

• In employment matters, HR files and termination letters document what the employer did and when. Most employment plaintiffs come to their lawyers after they have already lost the job, and what those records do not document is what the client lives with afterward: the economic strain, the job search setbacks, the loss of professional identity, the ongoing anxiety and sleep disruption from what happened at work. For clients still in the workplace, those same records miss the daily reality of hostility and retaliation as it accumulates.
• In immigration proceedings, agency correspondence tracks procedural milestones. It does not capture a child's reaction to a parent's arrest, the hardship of a work authorization gap, or the daily weight of uncertainty on a family.
• In family law cases, court filings establish legal frameworks. They do not show how a child's behavior changes around custody transitions, or how co-parenting logistics play out week after week.
• In disability and VA cases, office visit notes capture diagnoses and treatment plans. They do not show the four hours your client spent resting after a trip to the grocery store, or the number of nights pain kept them awake last month.
• In personal injury, medical records document clinical encounters. They do not capture the birthday missed, the modified sleeping arrangement, or the mounting frustration of a life constrained.

The pattern is the same in every setting. Institutional records serve institutional purposes. What the client actually experiences sits in a gap those records were never designed to fill.

Affiant works across all of these practice areas because what we do is practice-area-agnostic by design. Structured surveys the client completes from their mobile app. Multimedia journals (text, photo, audio, and video) that get timestamped, transcribed, and tagged automatically. Longitudinal records that accumulate over months. Exhibit-ready charts, calendars, and summary reports that move directly into demand packages, mediation memos, and hearing exhibits. Employment, immigration, and family law are on our near-term roadmap, with dedicated modules and reporting templates rolling out alongside continued deep investment in the practice areas we already serve.

Centering the client

The bigger reason we chose Affiant is what it says about whose voice we exist to carry.

Clients are the ones experiencing the full weight of the situation: the injury, the disability, the hostile workplace, the immigration limbo, the custody dispute. And they are often asked to wait months or years with very little sense that anyone is paying attention to what they are going through. When they finally do get to speak, they are asked to describe, from memory, events that have long since faded into generalities.

Affiant reframes that position. The client isn't an input to the case. They are the person whose firsthand account is the evidence. Our product has been built around that idea from the start.

A client using Affiant isn't waiting. They are documenting. Every survey they complete is a piece of structured evidence. Every journal entry is contemporaneous documentation of what is actually happening in their life. By the time they reach deposition or hearing, they have spent months articulating their experience with specificity, and they walk in prepared to speak to it in detail rather than in generalities.

Those are the people we're here to serve. The disability claimant who has been waiting years for a hearing and needs the process to acknowledge what she has actually been going through. The employment plaintiff who needs to capture what she is living with in the months after losing her job, in her own words. The father in a custody matter who wants the small daily moments with his kids to be part of the record. Our customers use the evidence in demands, mediations, and hearings. The clients get something else out of it too: agency, participation, the experience of being heard, and the closure that can achieve.

The category we're building: the Client Evidence Engine

The other thing that has sharpened since we started is the language for the category we occupy. We call it the Client Evidence Engine.

A Client Evidence Engine captures contemporaneous evidence of how a legal matter affects a client's daily life, then organizes, analyzes, and presents that evidence in formats ready for litigation, negotiation, hearings, and administrative proceedings. It's distinct from every other category in legal technology because of one thing: it creates new evidence. Evidence that didn't previously exist in any case file, medical record, HR folder, or agency record. Every other tool in the stack works with evidence that already exists.

The engine runs on a four-stage value chain:

• Capture. The client completes structured surveys and submits multimedia journal entries through a mobile app. Contemporaneity is enforced by design: clients can only enter data for the current day. The record is tamper-resistant by architecture, not by honor system.
• Organize. AI transcribes audio and video, summarizes content, and tags entries against a library of legally relevant categories. What was once a chronological stack of raw submissions becomes a navigable, searchable, filterable body of evidence.
• Analyze. AI synthesizes the accumulated record into case-level intelligence: overviews, pattern detection, risk flagging. Your team walks into mediation or hearing knowing what's in the record and what it shows, before anyone asks.
• Present. The data becomes charts, tables, calendars, and summary reports. A sleep disruption calendar. A functional limitation timeline. A missed-activity log. Visuals that make cumulative impact immediately legible to an adjuster, a judge, an ALJ, or a jury, without additional work from your team.

The Client Evidence Engine doesn't replace the rest of your stack. Case management systems organize firm operations. Claims intelligence platforms summarize institutional records. Client communication tools move messages. Each has a role. None of them generates the evidence we're talking about. They process institutional evidence (what doctors, agencies, employers, and courts produced) through their own pipelines. The Client Evidence Engine runs a parallel pipeline for client evidence: the record the client creates of their own experience. The two converge in the case file, and each contributes what the other cannot.

We'll be publishing more about the category in the coming weeks: the evidentiary foundations, the four-stage pipeline in depth, and the practice-area applications we're rolling out. For now, the short version is that the gap we have been closing for personal injury and disability firms is the same gap that exists in every practice area where client experience matters. Our customers have been telling us this for a while. The new name reflects it.

What's next

We're excited about this. More practice areas. Deeper documentation methodology. Better outputs. More firms closing the evidence gap in more kinds of cases. More clients getting to participate in their own representation rather than waiting passively while the system works around them.

If you're an attorney working in any of the practice areas above, we'd love to show you what the platform does.

Thanks to the firms and clients who got us here. We're glad to be building this with you.

The Affiant team