Regis Joseph Acosta
I build systems and write about what they break.
The systems are reshaping law, education, and how we read, and I'm inside each one. The throughline, if I had to name one, is the seam between things people insist on keeping separate: law and software, literature and the internet, new tools meeting old institutions.
For my day job I'm an AI Solutions Architect at Thomson Reuters, where I help attorneys and federal agencies actually use the tools reshaping their profession. On Tuesday nights I teach at Nazareth University, in a course that is nominally about Excel and actually about the habit of distrusting a number that has given you no reason to doubt it. The rest of my nights and weekends are where I find out what I believe about any of it. That's where Simon came from, an autonomous trading system I built mostly to see whether I could make something report its real performance instead of the flattering version. It's also where a novel and a game turned out, without my planning it, to be about the same thing: what a family hands down, and what it costs whoever has to receive it.
Selected writing
All writing →-
Where Privilege Breaks
Attorney-client privilege rests on a confidentiality that most AI deployments quietly dissolve, at a layer of the system that sits below anything the doctrine was written to inspect. A procedural walk through where the protection survives, where it fails, and why those turn out to be two different questions.
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Who Signs When the Machine Is Wrong?
AI tools fail differently than people do. They fail fluently, confidently, and without a tell, and the legal profession's entire accountability structure was built for a kind of mistake that announces itself. A note from inside the deployments on what the signature on the filing now certifies.
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Where Do Junior Lawyers Come From Now?
The apprenticeship that produced every lawyer alive was never designed. It was a byproduct of cheap junior labor doing necessary tedious work, and automation is collapsing the trade that funded it. A note from inside the room where the bottom rung is being sawn off.
Selected work
All projects →-
Simon
An autonomous trading system that separates prediction from strategy, fails loudly when it doesn't know, and learns from the things it gets wrong.
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LegacyMGMT
A life and dynasty simulator about the thing most games skip. What happens to everything you built after you die.
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When Bridges Break
A novel about an Italian-American family on the Jersey shore, the damage three generations passed down without meaning to, and the afternoon one brother told the truth.