Parsing 94 district courts worth of PDFs. It went about as well as you'd

expect.

We started with a simple problem. My co-founder is a litigator. I am an engineer. He was spending

hours every week digging through PDFs on federal court websites to find judge-specific rules, local

filing procedures, and deadline information. The PDFs were inconsistently formatted. Some were

searchable text. Some were scanned images from 1995. Some were updated quarterly. Some had not

changed in five years.

He asked me if I could build something to aggregate it all. I said sure. How hard could it be?

Famous last words.

The Scope Problem

There are 94 U.S. federal district courts. Each has local rules. Many of those local rules span

hundreds of pages. Then there are the individual judge practices, chamber-specific documents that

live on each judge's personal page on the court website. Some judges have them. Some do not. Some

courts organize them logically.…