Most Filings Never Reach a Federal Court. We Just Added the 26 County Courts Where They Land.

A commercial dispute in Chicago is not heard in federal court. It goes to the Circuit Court of Cook County, in front of one of 402 judges, each of whom may publish a standing order about how motions get noticed, whether courtesy copies are required, and what a case management conference expects from you. That order is a PDF on a county website. It is not in PACER. It is not on CourtListener. Nobody indexes it, and it is the document that decides whether your filing is accepted.

That is the gap people kept writing to us about. Federal coverage was useful, and then the same message arrived over and over: my practice is state court. So we built state courts.

What is live

Twenty-six county trial courts, 1,922 judges, and 2,187 rule documents. Not appellate courts, not state supreme courts. Trial courts, where filings actually land and where judges publish their own procedures.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A state supreme court has seven or nine justices and one rule book. A county trial court has hundreds of departments, each with its own standing order, its own courtesy copy rule, its own view on whether you may email chambers. Cook County alone carries more judges than most federal circuits.

The depth is uneven, and that is worth saying plainly

Some of these courts publish a procedures document for nearly every department. Santa Clara has 234 documents across 72 judges. Miami-Dade has 239 across 149. Others publish one court-wide order and little else: Multnomah has 6 documents across 51 judges, Denver 9 across 24.

We are not going to average that away. A court where every judge publishes is a different research problem from a court where one order governs everyone, and you should be able to see which is which before you rely on it.

Three courts we could not reach

Hennepin County, Milwaukee County, and Kings County are not in that table. All three sit behind a bot challenge on a statewide judiciary domain, and none of them served us a roster. We could have guessed at their judges from a search index and shipped something that looked complete. We did not. An adapter that cannot read its court throws an error instead of inventing a roster, and those three are marked unavailable until we solve them properly.

The pattern is worth knowing if you work in those states: every county-run court site we tried let us in. It was the state-run portals that did not.

How current it stays

Every court re-scrapes on a schedule. When a judge is reassigned, when a standing order is replaced, when a department renumbers, the change is picked up rather than waiting for someone to notice. A judge who disappears from a roster is not deleted on the first miss: it takes repeated absence across healthy runs before we retire them, because one bad scrape should never quietly empty a court.

Every extracted rule also carries the exact passage it came from, and that passage is checked against the source document rather than trusted. When we audited the full corpus against hash-verified copies of the original PDFs, 8 rules out of 36,290 quoted text we could not find in the source. We would rather publish that number than not know it.

Where to start

If you practice in any of these counties, look up your judge. That is the whole point of the thing: not the court, the judge, because the judge is who has the rule.

• Browse the state courts and see the coverage for each one
• Cook County, IL is the deepest roster at 402 judges
• Santa Clara County, CA has the most documents per judge
• The MCP server exposes the same data to an AI assistant, with citations

If your court is not here yet, tell us which one. That is exactly how these 26 got picked.