The Well

The Well

The Well is an open-source database of judicial procedure, including standing orders, filing preferences, courtroom technology, and motion practice for federal and California state judges.

Current coverage

Published judges
1
Jurisdictions
1
Code license
AGPL-3.0
Data license
CC-BY-SA 4.0
Sourcing rule
Every published procedural field cites a source.

Purpose

Court procedure is public, but it is scattered across standing orders, local rules, court pages, and practical experience. The Well collects those materials into structured judge pages so attorneys can verify rules quickly and compare practice across courtrooms.

Junior attorneys walk into courtrooms without the mental file every senior partner keeps: page-limit strictness, whether chambers takes phone calls, how long oral argument really runs. The information is already public, but reading and cross-referencing it for a hundred judges is a week of work nobody has time for. The Well is that week of work, done once, in the open.

What a judge page contains

  • Standing orders. Each published order is linked, dated, and tagged by topic.
  • Filing preferences. Page limits, courtesy-copy format, page-limit strictness.
  • Motion practice. Median ruling cadence, bench-ruling rate, meet-and-confer enforcement.
  • Oral argument. Default treatment, typical length, bench engagement, junior-attorney encouragement.
  • Communication. Chambers contact policy, telephonic appearance rules, courtroom email.
  • Courtroom technology. Available equipment, electronic-exhibit policy, hybrid-hearing posture.

Every field on a judge page links back to its source — a court-website URL, a standing-order PDF, a PACER-derived statistic, or an aggregated observation from verified attorney contributors.

Editorial principles

  1. Procedure, not personality. The Well does not publish subjective opinions about judges. Entries describe how the courtroom runs and cite where each fact came from.
  2. Every fact is sourced. Corrections without citations are indistinguishable from rumors. The schema requires a source entry for each procedural field.
  3. No AI in the data pipeline. Extractors are regex and structural HTML parsing. No language model writes judge data.
  4. Anonymity for contributors is architectural. The contribution path is designed so that no operator — including the maintainer — can link a specific observation to a specific contributor.

Browse and learn more

  • Judge index Browse published judges by jurisdiction.
  • Coverage and roadmap Which courts are published, in progress, and planned.
  • Methodology How data enters the database and how it is reviewed.
  • Glossary Definitions of the procedural field values used on judge pages.
  • FAQ Common questions about scope, sourcing, contribution, and use.
  • Contribute Add a jurisdiction, fix an extractor, correct a card, or apply as an attorney.