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Every California Superior Court publishes tentative rulings — preliminary decisions a judge intends to issue before the actual hearing. They're public records, but they live scattered across dozens of court websites in inconsistent formats, often disappearing within days. There's no single place to search across them, and the existing paid legal-research tools either don't index this data at all or charge enterprise pricing for it.
Tentative rulings are unusually important indicators of how a case will be decided: judges nearly always adopt their tentative ruling as the ultimate orderissued in the case. Yet those final orders are often unavailable to the public — they're buried behind paywalls or only served electronically to the litigants themselves.
That asymmetry is what makes the tentative ruling so valuable. For practitioners trying to understand local practice and the tendencies of trial-court judges across multiple jurisdictions, the tentative ruling is often the most accessible — and sometimes the only — window into how a particular judge actually decides motions.
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A tentative ruling is a preliminary decision issued by a California Superior Court judge before the scheduled hearing. Judges post them—usually the afternoon before the hearing—to give parties an opportunity to prepare arguments or submit if unopposed. Tentative rulings are adopted as the final order in the vast majority of cases, making them the most accessible public record of how a judge actually decides motions.
DecisionDepot (decisiondepot.legal) provides free, full-text and AI-powered search across every California Superior Court tentative ruling we index. We cover 34+ counties. No login required — just type a case name, party, attorney, or legal concept into the search bar.
DecisionDepot's judge directory (decisiondepot.legal/judges) shows grant rates, denial rates, continued-matter rates, prevailing-party splits, and motion-type breakdowns for every judge whose rulings we index. Click any judge's name to open their full dossier.
DecisionDepot indexes 34+ California Superior Courts, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Diego, Orange, Sacramento, Riverside, San Bernardino, Marin, Sonoma, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and many more. See the full coverage list at decisiondepot.legal/counties.
DecisionDepot runs an automated scraper that collects newly posted tentative rulings from each court's website every weekday afternoon (when courts post them). New rulings typically appear in our database within hours of being posted by the court.
Yes. DecisionDepot's attorney directory (decisiondepot.legal/attorneys) shows win rates, counties appeared in, judges appeared before, and case history for every attorney named in a tentative ruling we have indexed. Data is drawn from the rulings themselves — name normalization is imperfect so verify counts before relying on them.
After a tentative ruling is posted, parties have until 4:00 p.m. on the court day before the hearing to notify the court and opposing counsel that they intend to appear and argue. If no party contests the ruling, it is automatically adopted as the final order and the hearing is taken off calendar. In practice, most tentative rulings become the final order — making them reliable predictors of case outcomes.
Tentative rulings show exactly how a judge reasons through motions: what arguments they find persuasive, which authorities they cite, and how they weigh competing evidence. Searching DecisionDepot for a judge's past tentative rulings on similar motions gives litigators a preview of the reasoning they will need to address or reinforce in their own briefs and oral argument. The judge directory's motion-type breakdown tells you whether a judge tends to grant or deny the specific type of motion you are filing.
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