Ask a Judge's Rules and Get the Answer With Its Source

Every judge page now answers questions. Press Cmd + K, or click the search box, type what you actually want to know, and press Enter. You get a plain-English answer, the rule it rests on quoted word for word, and a link that opens the judge's filed document to the page the quote came from.

Why a search box was not enough

A judge's requirements are rarely written the way anyone searches for them. Judge Lawrence P. Riff in Department 534 of Los Angeles Superior Court requires a courtesy copy of any written opposition to an ex parte application by 8:30 a.m. the day of the hearing, sent to a specific department email address. Nobody searches for that sentence. They search for “chambers copy.”

That gap between the words people use and the words a court order uses is the whole problem. Keyword search puts you in a nine-page PDF and leaves you to find the paragraph. An answer hands you the paragraph and shows you where it lives.

Every claim carries its source

Answers come from the judge's own filed documents, not from a model's memory of how courts usually work. Before any claim reaches the screen, the sentence it quotes is checked against the source text. If the quote does not appear there word for word, the claim is dropped. If nothing survives, the assistant says the rules do not cover it rather than producing something plausible.

That last behavior matters more than it sounds. Courts have sanctioned filers for citations that an AI tool invented. For a deadline or a page limit, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer, so the assistant is built to refuse.

What people are using it for

These are the questions that decide whether a filing is accepted, and they are the ones the rules answer badly. Every one of them has a different answer in the next courtroom over.

• Courtesy and chambers copies. Whether one is required, above what page count, in what format, and where it goes. The rules differ by judge in the same courthouse.
• Page and word limits. What the cap is for a brief, whether replies get a different one, and what needs prior permission.
• Getting a motion in front of the judge. Whether a pre-motion letter or conference is required first, and what it has to contain.
• Moving a date. How much notice an adjournment needs, in what form, and what the request has to say about the other parties.
• When a filing is actually due. Cutoff times, what counts as filed, and which days the court is closed.

Where it stops

The assistant only answers about the judge whose page you are on, because a question like “what are the page limits” has no answer until you know whose courtroom you are in. It reads what that judge has filed and nothing else, so it will not tell you about the local rules or the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. It is not legal advice, and rules change. Every answer links to the source so you can confirm it before you file, which is the same thing a careful filer would do anyway.

Try it

Open any judge page and press Cmd + K. Start with Los Angeles Superior Court, where coverage is deepest, or browse federal district courts. The same search box still jumps to any judge or court, so nothing you already do got slower.