Where a money graph changes the outcome.

You're assigned a case before a circuit judge. Opposing counsel is a large local firm. Before the hearing you need to know: did that firm — its partners, or its PAC — contribute to this judge's campaign? If so, in what amount, and is it enough to support a motion for recusal or, at minimum, disclosure?

A name search on the state portal misses the indirect routes: a partner who gave through the firm's PAC, a spouse's contribution, or a bar group the partners belong to that backed the bench collectively. The graph resolves those identities and follows the edges for you.

Why it's hard by hand

Contributions are filed under inconsistent name spellings, split across cycles, and routed through committees. Reconstructing the full picture manually is slow and easy to under-count — exactly the gap an opposing party will exploit if your motion is incomplete.

A judge ran unopposed — yet raised a substantial war chest. Who funded a race with no opponent, and do those donors share an affiliation? Coordinated giving by an Inn of Court, a bar association, or a cluster of firms can signal an influence relationship worth documenting.

Cluster detection on the graph surfaces the group, not just the individual checks: it finds donors who repeatedly fund the same set of candidates together, then names the overlap.

Output

A ranked list of co-funding blocs, the candidates each bloc backs, and the aggregate dollars — with every contribution traceable to its source filing.

A candidate's largest "donor" is a committee with an anodyne name. Where did that committee's money actually come from? A funds B, B funds C, C funds the candidate — and the public-facing report only shows the last hop.

Path-finding walks the directed money-flow graph backward through PACs and committees to reveal the upstream sources, across multiple cycles if the money moved over time.

Where it matters

Pass-through and bundling patterns are often legal but rarely obvious. Surfacing them is the difference between reporting "Committee X gave $50k" and "Committee X relayed money that originated with three named industry donors."

Before retaining an expert witness, deposing opposing counsel, or relying on a public official's neutrality, build a quick, defensible picture of their political giving and the relationships it implies.

The same resolution and graph machinery that powers recusal vetting applies to any named individual or entity: who they fund, who funds them, and whose circles they sit in — with a citation behind every claim.

Used by

Litigation teams, compliance and ethics officers, and anyone who needs a conflict check that holds up when challenged.

Newsrooms and research teams live and die by sourcing. A claim about who funded whom is only publishable if it traces to a primary record. The analyst is built so that every figure it returns links to a filed contribution — no aggregated mystery numbers.

Start broad ("biggest donors this cycle"), then drill: expand a donor's network, follow a path between two players, or pull the full contribution history behind a single relationship.

Deliverable

A reproducible, cited analysis another reporter or attorney can independently verify against the same public filings.