My Bio

Hi, my name is Andrew G. Watters. I am a radically honest, category-defying polymath based in Redwood City, California, USA. I am primarily a lawyer, with a law degree from U.C. College of Law San Francisco (formerly known as U.C. Hastings College of Law), a bachelor's degree from UCLA, and nineteen years of professional experience. I have had my own practice since 2012, and my own law firm since 2016. I offer legal services, including complex private investigations; and a custom software platform for attorneys called Slash. I am married to Mrs. Right, with whom I welcomed our daughter Jennifer in 2022. My personal trademark is my carbon fiber briefcase from Tecknomonster, a combined aerospace/luggage company. For entertainment purposes, I recently resurrected a popular anonymous discussion board for lawyers called JD Underground, which has been a great diversion from the law firm for me. I also sometimes build computer systems and custom guitars, which I find to be self-actualizing. I am originally from San Francisco, which I always enjoy telling people because Dirty Harry shares my hometown. Finally, like Thanos and Tony Stark, I am cursed with knowledge-- and I try to use this substantial gift for positive things. Still trying to be a moderate Democrat.

News

October 26, 2025: Latest invention, which I've been working on occasionally since 2013, is disclosed. It's an electronic dazzler that is safe and effective as compared to traditional pyrotechnic flashbang grenades. I had this idea in 2008 after someone showed me a basic stun gun and I was shocked at how loud it was, even with just a single 9 volt battery. Prototype coming in 2026.

October 19, 2025: I'm sick of left-wing radicals owning the Democratic Party at the moment. So, in consultation with some political folks over the last six months, I've decided to form the Blue Eagle PAC. The mission is to reclaim the party for moderates. Check it out.

October 18, 2025: Russell Crowe once said, on the set of Gladiator: "the lines are garbage, but I am the greatest actor in the world, and I can make even garbage sound beautiful." He went on to deliver a classic monologue that is in film history books. I had the same experience recently when dealing with a document production in which the Plaintiff sent us a 23-minute video of herself scrolling through her WeChat chat history with my client. They probably never thought I would do this, but instead of spending $10,000 of my client's money on a professional translation service, I used command line tools on Linux and macOS to (1) extract still images from the video once per second, (2) recognize the Chinese text with Tesseract, which is a free OCR program, (3) translate the text with the free tool translate-shell, which interfaces with Google Translate, (4) compose three-up images showing the still, Chinese text, and English translation side-by-side, and (5) create a PDF booklet of all the messages, in the correct order, for easy reading in English. I am producing it back to them so everyone is on the same page. The client loves this. One of the most difficult tasks I've ever done in law, and I was only able to do it because I am the greatest lawyer-programmer in the world.


I sent this description and screenshots to a few lawyers in my area, and one of them responded back that his head exploded. A great solution for saving money.

Ventures

Attorney - general civil litigation and complex family law, with nineteen years of experience and 40+ trials. Also available for complex private investigations, including missing persons/homicide and cyber/corporate espionage. Software platform Slash for licensing to fellow attorneys who want a non-Clio solution. Video-on-demand masterclasses in family law as a joint venture with a L.A. law firm. I also offer a suite of family law tools that people might find helpful.

Rællic® - Advanced Information Systems and heavy duty computers, with custom LAMP web application programming by yours truly, plus C and Python programming by our in-house software engineer. This is also where my special, invitation-only custom guitars live.

Tutorials and Articles

Here are my popular tutorials/articles/videos:

Linux tips and tricks - random tips learned the hard way. 🔥

Creative writing - I seem to have an unusual connection to the ether that gives me a limitless supply of material.

Animal House - the most realistic fraternity movie of all time, and should be required viewing for everyone considering joining a Greek Letter Organization. I was going through some old boxes and realized that I have a trove of great material from the 2000-2002 era of my life that will be nice to revisit, and I intend a write-up of this film in that context. Literally every principal character in this movie had an analog in UCLA Theta Chi, which I joined in 2000. We even did a tribute/parody video internally where we tried to mimic one important scene from the movie as part of a recruiting video.

Jack Reacher - "He doesn't care about the law. He doesn't care about proof. He only cares about what's right." That's why Jack Reacher is my hero. This is a write-up of the 2012 film, which is my favorite version of Jack Reacher because Tom Cruise fits the role so well-- and the film doesn't shy away from controversial topics, such as mass murder and sexual homicide. Coming soon.

Run your own email server Howto - have you ever wanted to take full control of your email? Not for the faint of heart.

Privoxy on macOS Howto - have you ever wanted to block ads on the web on your Mac without having to install MacPorts? This is for you.

Lattice™ - next-gen user interface for slash.law, featuring a novel technique for focus detection and raising.

Andy's Dashboard - a free charting solution for server administrators.

Introduction to microexpressions - my guest lecture at Stanford.

Unboxing a new IBM Model M keyboard - travel back in time to 1988.

Andy's Hardware - market research on the concept of a Made in USA hardware store.

100G office network Howto - the fastest, most reliable office LAN that money can buy.

10 gigabit networking - a howto on my 10 gig office setup, which rocks.

The Forever War - my superfan-level tribute to the greatest science fiction novel of all time.

A fractal crystal lattice of Gaussian primes - research on the fractality of prime numbers in Mathematica.

My trademark concept art - I commissioned this piece from a vision in my head, and I decided to start using it as my background. It really fits me, I think.

Hall of Fame: services, products, and service providers that I use and strongly recommend.

Hall of Shame: if someone gets me to the point of posting a whole web page about them on here, you know they went way too far in whatever they were doing wrong.