About

Mission

Make the procedural knowledge that senior litigators carry in their heads available to every attorney with a computer — without rumors, without ratings, and without exposing the contributors who share what they have seen.

Scope

The Well covers procedure: how a judge runs the courtroom and what attorneys must do to comply. It does not publish subjective opinions, ideological labels, reversal rates intended as quality signals, or litigant-side commentary about case outcomes.

The initial scope is the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California (S.D. Cal.). Coverage will expand to additional federal district courts in California, the Ninth Circuit, and the largest California state superior courts. See the coverage and roadmap page for the current plan.

What a judge page describes

Each judge page collects, in one place, every procedural fact a practitioner needs before filing or appearing — page limits, courtesy copies, motion-ruling cadence, oral-argument defaults, junior-attorney encouragement, courtroom technology, telephonic-appearance policy, and the standing orders themselves. Every field is sourced, and the source is linked.

For definitions of the field values, see the glossary. For the underlying schema, see docs/schema.md.

Editorial principles

• Procedure, not personality. No subjective ratings, ideological labels, or commentary on outcomes.
• Every fact is sourced. Each procedural field carries a source entry. Corrections require a citation.
• No AI in the data pipeline. Extractors are deterministic — regex and structural parsing.
• Anonymity by architecture. Contributor identity cannot be linked to a specific observation, even by operators.
• Public review. The build is public. Scrapers commit changes as Git diffs that maintainers and the community can review.

Governance

The Well is operated solely by Zachary Brenner. Decisions about scope, schema, and editorial policy are made publicly through pull requests and issues against the source repository. The warrant canary reflects the current status of legal process directed at the operator.

See docs/governance.md for the full governance document, including how disputes are resolved, how contributors are vetted, and how scraper-driven commits are reviewed.

Funding

The Well operates without advertising, paid placements, or commercial partnerships. Hosting is provided by Cloudflare Pages on a free tier. Project costs are absorbed by the maintainer and supplemented by voluntary GitHub Sponsors contributions. No funder receives editorial influence.

Licenses

• Code: AGPL-3.0. If you operate a modified version as a network service, you must publish your modifications under the same license.
• Data and schema: CC-BY-SA 4.0. Attribute The Well, share derivatives under the same license.

See the code license and data license for the full terms.

Maintainer

The Well is maintained by Zachary Brenner. He retains sole control of the source repository, the production deployment, the associated domains, and the operational credentials. Security disclosures should follow the process described in SECURITY.md.