Checking a Filing Against the Judge's Rules

In May 2021, Bond, Schoeneck & King, a litigation firm of about 250 lawyers in upstate New York, filed a summary judgment motion in the Eastern District of New York. The brief was well written and cited the right law.

The court terminated the motion because the attorneys filed their brief before the other side had finished briefing. Judge Amon's standing order requires all motion papers to be fully briefed before anything is filed on ECF, so the court told them to start over.

Judge Amon's rule is on page three of a six-page PDF on the court's website. It takes about ninety seconds to find if you know to look for it, and otherwise you find out when the judge sends the motion back.

The step between drafting and filing

In a law firm, one person usually drafts a document and someone else reviews it before it is filed with the court. Most legal software helps with drafting, with filing or with calendaring deadlines.

Almost no software checks whether the document follows the assigned judge's rules before it is filed.

Today the check depends on what people remember. For example, a paralegal may keep a spreadsheet of judges' rules, or a docketing clerk may remember that Judge Block wants a table of contents on anything over 25 pages. The largest firms have teams that track these requirements across judges and districts.

At most firms, nobody is checking at all.

Two judges in the same courthouse

Here is what makes this problem genuinely hard, and why it is not something a static rule library can solve.

Compare two judges in the Eastern District of New York who sit in the same courthouse on Cadman Plaza East in Brooklyn.

Judge Amon's standing order says you cannot file any motion papers until the motion is fully briefed. All moving papers, opposition, and reply must be served before anything goes on the docket. She also requires a hard-copy courtesy package delivered to chambers: opening brief, opposition, Rule 56.1 statements, and exhibits, in a separate binder, everything double-sided. And you need to have held a pre-motion conference before filing any dispositive motion.

Judge Block, one floor away, does not want courtesy copies at all. But he has a hard 25-page limit on memoranda of law. If your brief is 31 pages, you are six pages over, and you either need to file a formal motion requesting more pages or cut a fifth of your argument.

The two judges have different requirements for the same brief. One wants a tabbed binder printed double-sided, and the other does not want paper. Whether a brief complies depends on which judge has the case.

There are 670 active federal judges across 94 districts, and each one publishes individual rules and practices, usually as a PDF on a court website that changes without notice. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure set a baseline, and each district's local rules override parts of it. Individual standing orders override both, and they are the hardest of the three to find and track.

What we found in the data

We pulled docket data from the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York and read the text of the docket entries to check each finding.

For each count below, we read the docket entries and dropped results that did not hold up.

Here is what we found.

Motions terminated by judges for standing order violations. We verified 46 in the Eastern District alone, and each was terminated for a procedural reason. The bundling rule that tripped up Bond Schoeneck accounted for 31 of them across 16 different judges. Another 15 were terminated because the attorney filed a dispositive motion without requesting a required pre-motion conference first.

Motions filed just to ask for more pages. We found 7,620 across both districts. Each is a formal "Motion for Leave to File Excess Pages", filed after an attorney wrote past the judge's page limit and had to ask permission to exceed it. We spot-checked over a hundred of them and found no false positives.

Courtesy copy failures. 63 verified cases where chambers never received required hard copies. The judge had to issue an order telling counsel to send what should have been sent automatically.

Broader compliance signals. We found 5,971 cases across both districts where docket entries mention "Individual Rules" alongside the word "violation". Some are terminated motions, and many are warnings, corrections or orders telling counsel to re-read the judge's practices.

The Eastern and Southern Districts of New York handle about 7% of all federal case filings. The rules behind these failures, such as bundling, pre-motion conferences, page limits and courtesy copies, exist in some form in nearly every federal district.

Why a searchable database is not enough

Publishing the rules in a searchable database helps, but it still depends on the attorney knowing to look.

Judge Amon's standing order was public on the court's website when Bond Schoeneck filed its motion. The attorney still had to find the order and work out which of its six pages applied to a summary judgment motion, while also doing the legal work.

If you are building a filing product and tracking acceptance rates, this is the part of the funnel that is hardest to see. A filing gets rejected or a motion gets terminated, and it looks like a user error. But it is actually a product gap. The user was never told what the requirements were at the moment it mattered.

A better approach is to show the controlling rules before the attorney starts writing, and to check the document before it is filed on ECF. Each requirement should link back to its source document so the attorney can verify it.

Building the check into the workflow

Firms already automate deadline calculation, and malpractice insurers started requiring it. Filing compliance is the same kind of problem, but nobody has built the tools for it yet.

Building that check means treating court rules as structured data and running the check inside the drafting and filing workflow. In federal litigation the rules include the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the individual rules of 670 judges, each published as its own PDF.