We Found 12,000+ Filing Rules Hiding Across 27 State Courts

It is 4:47 p.m. The filing is ready. Then somebody asks the question that turns a normal afternoon into an archaeological dig: did anyone check the judge's rules?

The local rules say one thing. The civil division page adds another. The assigned department keeps its own PDF, last redesigned around the time BlackBerry still sponsored email signatures. Somewhere across those pages: page limits, exhibit tabs, courtesy copies, proposed-order formatting, maybe a requirement to call chambers before doing the thing you were about to do

For litigators, this is not legal trivia. For paralegals, it is Tuesday

Today Court Rules is opening a state-court beta across 27 major trial courts, from Los Angeles to Philadelphia and King County to Miami-Dade: 2,000+ active judges, 2,200+ source documents, and 12,000+ filing rules pulled out of the places courts actually publish them. The court website scavenger hunt just got considerably shorter

10,000+ legal professionals since February

Court Rules has reached 10,000+ litigators, paralegals, and legal-tech builders since February. They are not here for a legal-news scroll. They are finding the court, finding the judge, and reading the source before something gets filed

A litigator needs to know whether the motion is twenty pages or twenty-five. A paralegal needs the courtesy-copy address, the exhibit-tab rule, and whether the proposed order is a separate upload. Legal software needs the same answers in a format it can use, with the source attached, because "the model sounded confident" is not a filing strategy

Court Rules belongs on the filing checklist. The job is simple: tell you what the court and judge require, show you where it came from, and keep it current. Lawyers should not need six browser tabs. Paralegals should not need to remember which judges hide their rules under "Forms". Software should not have to guess

The rule does not live in one place

In federal court, the order is usually easy to follow: national rules, district rules, then the judge's individual practices. State trial courts looked at that tidy arrangement and chose adventure

The rule that matters may belong to the state, county, division, courthouse, department, calendar, or judge. Sometimes it lives in a PDF. Sometimes it is an HTML page built during the Bush administration. Sometimes the courtroom information sheet is the whole ballgame. The document called "Helpful Hints" may contain a requirement that is neither optional nor especially helpful to discover late

So Court Rules follows the mess instead of flattening it. Court-wide e-filing rules can sit beside civil-division orders and a judge's courtesy-copy instructions without pretending they are the same thing. If the judge publishes nothing individually, the page says so and shows the court rules that still apply. Every instruction keeps its source and exact language

The courts are wildly different

• Cook County alone has 404 active judges. That is not a typo. It is a small procedural country hiding inside Chicago
• Miami-Dade has 240 tracked source documents across 150 judges. Finding all of those by hand is no longer character-building
• Santa Clara publishes 235 documents for 72 judges, one of the deepest sets of judge rules in the beta
• St. Louis County is the newest court on the board, with 46 judges and 55 tracked documents
• Texas is represented four different ways because Harris, Bexar, Dallas, and Travis counties do not publish their procedures the same way. That is exactly why each court has to be handled separately

Why this is still a beta

These court websites change without warning, some courts publish much more than others, and we are still filling gaps. Santa Clara publishes several documents per judge. Multnomah publishes six documents for 52 judges. Those are facts about the courts, not a reason to invent an average and call the job finished

So we show the gaps. Every rule links back to its source. Missing documents stay visibly missing. A court that suddenly drops half its roster triggers an alarm instead of a shrug. Beta means the site is useful now, but some courts and judges still need more work

We need to add a lot more courts

Having 27 courts on the site is useful. It is not enough. If your cases are in a court we do not cover, this release does nothing for you

What applies to this filing, before this judge, in this court, today?

The answer should show the exact language, the source, and the date we checked it. Not a search page full of vaguely related PDFs. Not an AI guess. An answer you can put into the filing checklist and defend

Next we are adding more busy trial courts, finding the missing departments and judges in the courts already on the site, and checking for changes faster. If you build docketing, case-management, or legal AI software, the API should give your product the same answer and the same source

For now: pick a court, find your judge, and check the weird PDF before it checks you. If your court is missing, send us the name. Tell us what to add next