For visitors who'd rather read than walk.
# Asset-recovery specialist — the trail stayed hot
You're a partner at a four-person forensic-accounting firm
specializing in asset recovery. Between depositions. Thirty minutes
to evaluate a tool a colleague mentioned at the last NAFA meeting.
The hook on Merkle Trust's landing: the difference between recovery
and loss is whether the trail stayed hot. The product makes the
trail stay hot.
Four real paths exist. For a partner at a four-person forensic firm,
the order is operator-first.
Subscribe to a regional operator. Legal-compliance operator runs
the chain on infrastructure under bar-association data-handling
rules. The operator handles compliance; you handle recovery work.
The path most small forensic firms take.
Paste the markdown into your LLM. Card files into Claude or
another LLM. Lightest path.
Clone GarrisonNode from GitHub. Self-install on the office
workstation. Real client material runs on-premises only. Open
source.
Join the mesh. GitHub install plus mesh anchoring with peer
recovery firms and, optionally, an engaging law firm's read-only
verifier.
A sandboxed Merkle Trust loads the synthetic Estate of Eleanor M.,
$210,000 missing. Caregiver is Eleanor's live-in companion of three
years. Records:
Three years of bank statements subpoenaed from two institutions,
sealed at receipt with date stamps and transmission email metadata.
Caregiver's checking-account statements, sealed at receipt.
A trail of seventeen transactions linking Eleanor's account to
the caregiver's, then onward.
Photographs of canceled checks with caregiver's signature,
sealed at scanning.
Eleanor's medical records (dementia diagnosis with progression
notes) — separately privileged, redacted summary only.
Analytical workpapers — schedules, reconciliations,
transaction-level annotations — sealed at drafting.
The walk takes the recover-what's-recoverable sidebar — the case
the family is paying for. The trace breaks down: of the $210K
missing, $84K went to a real-estate down payment two states away
(recoverable through a constructive-trust action filed in the
destination state); $32K went to a vehicle purchase (recoverable
through a replevin action with a TRO motion); $47K went to a
brokerage account (recoverable through subpoena of the brokerage
plus turnover order); and the remaining ~$47K went to small
unattested transactions and consumption (most of which is recovered
indirectly through the constructive-trust action's reach).
```
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
RECOVERY MAP — ESTATE OF ELEANOR M.
$210,000 missing
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
$84,000 → real-estate down payment
constructive trust (recoverable)
$32,000 → vehicle
replevin + TRO (recoverable)
$47,000 → brokerage account
subpoena + turnover (recoverable)
~$47,000 → consumption + small-tx
indirect reach via above
Recoverable estimate: ~$163K
Trail stayed hot from receipt forward.
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
```
Methodology is contemporaneous, not reconstructed. Each workpaper
sealed at drafting; each annotation sealed at addition. The
discovery production carries verification URLs in the metadata.
Source documents were sealed at intake. Subpoena responses,
caregiver statements, photographs of canceled checks — each got a
hash the moment your firm received them, with the transmission email
or subpoena response sealed alongside.
Workpapers are sealed at drafting. Each schedule, each
reconciliation, each annotation gets its own seal at the moment it
was written. Methodology is attested as it is built — when opposing
counsel asks "when did you reach that conclusion," the chain has
the answer.
The chain does not depend on the institutions cooperating. The
banks' subpoena responses are sealed at receipt; whether the banks
later argue, the seal stands. The brokerage's records are sealed
at production; the chain has them whether or not the brokerage's
counsel later contests the subpoena's scope.
The .md button puts the recovery-pattern summary into your
tag-along bundle, including the recovery-map slab. Comment field
routes a specific recovery-strategy question to your own claude.ai
session.
Run a ceremony. Fifteen seconds.
Progress bar reads "done — 5,847 files attested, 64 critical files
verified, new anchor at " followed by the first eight hex
characters of the root.
Sealed: "Every workpaper across every active recovery case is
sealed. Nothing has been altered since the date of seal. Here is
today's proof."
The most useful close for a recovery firm is install on the office
workstation tomorrow morning, plus the peer-referral kit for the
next NAFA meeting. The package, the cert, the recovery seed — all
ride along.
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That was the simulated path through Estate of Eleanor M. and a
trail that stayed hot. The full card breaks out the
constructive-trust mechanic, the replevin-and-TRO pattern, and a
recovery-rate prediction that's yours to test.