Blake Vanderhyde's work has moved across several fields: plaintiff legal marketing, a five-year investigation into antimicrobial resistance, and now artificial intelligence for law firms. One orientation runs under all of it. A consistent turn toward people who are harmed, and toward people who are overlooked.
It began before law school.
As an undergraduate, Blake served as president of his college's chapter of Best Buddies, an organization that builds friendships between college students and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. He kept a one-on-one friendship with a buddy and organized the chapter's outings, holiday gatherings, and community events.
One day made the work concrete. On a chapter trip to the Mall of America, Blake found that parts of the building had not been adapted for wheelchairs. So that no one would be left behind, he spent the day folding wheelchairs and carrying students through the sections they could not otherwise reach.
The same concern shaped his academic work. For his senior thesis, he documented the daily barriers a fellow student with achondroplasia navigated simply to cross campus and finish her degree, mapping the obstacles built into an environment that was never designed with her in mind.
None of this was abstract. These experiences exposed Blake to the practical consequences of inaccessible environments and systemic barriers. They also inspired him to pursue a legal career focused on helping others.
The orientation held as the work changed. In plaintiff practice, it became a deliberate choice. Blake represented injured individuals rather than the institutions that injured them, and built a marketing operation whose purpose was connecting people who had been harmed with lawyers who could help them. That work is described at Legal Marketing.
In the antimicrobial resistance work, it was the same instinct applied to a different population, the people a public health crisis harms first and worst. Blake spent five years on a problem that was not his to solve, because the scale of the potential harm made it impossible to ignore. That work is described Antimicrobial Resistance.
In A4A, it returns to the original problem in a new form. Too many victims of mass injury never reach the right firm. The company is built to close that gap. That work is described at AI for Lawyers.
Different fields. The same question underneath each one: who is being harmed or left out, and what would help.