Built by an attorney who reads the fine print for a living

My name is Dan Swenson. I am a data nerd who is also a Minnesota workers' compensation attorney and a city council member. Public information should not be hard to use, so I build this network of sites as a hobby: I pull scattered public records out of PDFs and government databases and turn them into tools regular people can actually use. I do not use these sites to find legal clients, except for MN Comp Buddy which is my actual day job. The tools are free. The sites pay for their own hosting through clearly disclosed referral links and a few optional paid guides.

Whether hail hit your house is in NOAA's radar archives. Whether your contractor is licensed is in the Department of Labor and Industry's nightly file. Whether "we'll cover your deductible" is legal is in Minnesota Statutes section 325E.66 (it isn't). None of that should require buying a $40 hail report or trusting the guy knocking on your door. So this site pulls the public data and explains the law, with the statute cited on every claim so you can check my work.

That last part is the attorney habit that runs the whole site: every factual statement traces to a source you can open yourself.Hail events link to NOAA data. License statuses come straight from the state's file, refreshed nightly, with the date shown. Legal guides cite chapter and section, not "experts say." Where radar can't prove something (and it can't prove damage on your specific shingles), the site says so in plain sight rather than fine print.

MN Hail Buddy is not a law firm and I'm not your lawyer. Reading this site doesn't create an attorney-client relationship, and the guides are education, not legal advice about your claim. The site is also not an insurance company, not a contractor, and not affiliated with the State of Minnesota or NOAA.

The site is free for homeowners and always will be. If you ask to be connected with a licensed contractor for an inspection, we may be compensated for that referral: that's disclosed on the form, in the privacy policy, and now here. What we will never do: sell your lookup history (we don't keep it), let a contractor pay to look more licensed than the state's file says, or soften the honest answer to make a lead form convert better.