How DraftAria checks court rules every week

Courts change their local rules and standing orders throughout the year, often by posting a new PDF on their website. A filing that met the rules last month can miss them this month. Here is how DraftAria keeps watch, and what it does and doesn’t do.

1. We start from the courts’ own websites

We keep a register of 209 official sources: the U.S. Supreme Court, the 13 federal courts of appeals, all 94 federal district courts, all 94 bankruptcy courts, and 7 pages for the national rules: the Federal Rules of Civil, Criminal, Appellate and Bankruptcy Procedure, the Federal Rules of Evidence, the Rules of the Supreme Court, and pending amendments to the federal rules. Each entry points to the court’s official website, not to a third-party summary.

Today the register covers federal courts. State courts are on our roadmap.

2. Every Monday, an automated check visits each court

Each week an automated job visits every source in the register, finds the court’s local rules and standing orders pages, and records a fingerprint of each page and each rule document it links to. A fingerprint is a short summary that changes whenever the content changes, so we can tell that something is different without storing the court’s documents. If a site can’t be reached, or no rules page can be found, that is reported too.

3. It reads the rules, not just the dates

Knowing that a PDF changed isn’t very useful on its own. So the check also reads the text of the rules pages and of any new or changed rule PDF (using a standard PDF-to-text tool), and picks out the passages about specific filing requirements:

When one of those passages changes, the report shows the new wording, so a reviewer can see straight away that, say, a court’s font size or page limit requirement was reworded.

4. A person reviews every change

The check never edits DraftAria’s rules by itself. It produces a report for our team listing each change as its own item to review. A reviewer reads the court’s new text and decides whether any of our stored requirements need updating.

That matters because automated text matching can’t tell a substantive change from a reformatted page. It finds the changes; people decide what they mean.

5. “Not yet verified” until a reviewer signs off

Every court requirement in DraftAria has to point back to its official source: the URL, the rule number and the exact quoted text. A reviewing attorney or experienced paralegal then checks the requirement against that quote and marks it verified, with their name and the date.

Until that happens, the requirement is shown as “Not yet verified” in filing checks, the template generator and our public court pages. When the weekly check flags a change to a court’s rules, the affected requirements go back to unverified until they have been re-checked.

6. December 1 is a big day

The national federal rules are amended on December 1 each year. We re-check our federal filing catalog after each cycle, and the weekly check watches the pending-amendments page so upcoming changes are on our radar before they take effect.

What this means for you

DraftAria’s court data is a head start, not a substitute for the rules. Before you file:

• Check the court’s current local rules and standing orders.
• Treat any requirement marked “Not yet verified” as a prompt to look it up.
• If you spot a requirement we have wrong, tell us at support@draftaria.com.

You can see what we hold for each court on the court pages, and more about our methods in the Trust Center.