Help & dataset coverage

California Superior Courts only operate Monday–Friday and close on state holidays. Tentative rulings are posted by the court the afternoon BEFORE a hearing (typically by 2pm Pacific the prior court day).

So when you visit on a court day, “Today” means today's calendar. When you visit on a weekend or holiday, “Today” shows the next court dayinstead — because there's nothing happening today and the next interesting calendar is whatever comes next.

Right now we're showing: Next court day · Mon, Aug 24 (it's the weekend).

Many California courts only leave tentative-ruling PDFs online for 7 to 60 days before pulling them. We started indexing different courts at different points in 2025–2026, so the searchable history varies by jurisdiction.

• 42,965 total rulings indexed across 37 monitored courts.
• Earliest indexed ruling: Aug 28, 2000.
• Last data refresh: 1 day ago (data refreshes about every 15 minutes during California business hours).

Tentative rulings are unusually important indicators of how a case will be decided: judges nearly always adopt their tentative ruling as the ultimate order issued 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.

The search box runs a three-step pipeline:

1. Parsing. A small LLM (Gemini Flash Lite) reads your prose and extracts filters — county, division, date range, judge, motion type, prevailing party. Filters are applied to the SQL query.
2. Hybrid retrieval. Two parallel searches run: full-text-search (Postgres GIN index, BM25-style ranking) and vector similarity (pgvector against per-chunk text embeddings). Results are fused via Reciprocal Rank Fusion.
3. Synthesized answer (optional). For questions ending in “?” or starting with words like “how/why”, we additionally feed the top 5 hits to Gemini Flash and ask for a 2–3 paragraph cited answer.

You can refine results after they appear by clicking date-range presets or county chips — no need to re-type the query.

The /cases page has a full sidebar of filters that all write to the URL — so any filtered view is shareable as a link and survives the back button:

• Date range — exact dates or one-click presets (past 7 days, past 30 days, this year, etc.)
• County, division, ruling, prevailing party
• Motion type — scoped to the selected county (only shows motions actually IN that county)
• Case type — auto-extracted from rulings (asbestos, employment, securities, etc.)
• Appearance required / not required
• CSV export — download up to 1000 filtered rows for spreadsheets

• Tentative ≠ final. Tentative rulings usually become the final order, but parties can request oral argument (often by 4pm the prior court day) and the judge may change course at the hearing. Always verify against the final order before relying on a tentative ruling.
• Not all counties post tentatives. Some California counties publish all tentatives; others post only some divisions (e.g., civil but not family law); a few post none at all. We index whatever's public.
• Historical gaps.Courts pull tentatives offline aggressively. If a search returns no results for an older date range, it doesn't mean the rulings never existed — it usually means they're no longer publicly available anywhere.
• AI summaries are best-effort. The “Synthesize answer” feature uses an LLM that can make mistakes. The answers always cite specific cases — read those cases before relying on the synthesis.
• Not legal advice.DecisionDepot is a research tool, not a substitute for an attorney's judgment. Don't treat anything you find here as advice for a client matter.

Found a bug? Want a county added? See a ruling that's misclassified? Email support@decisiondepot.legal — include a screenshot or the ruling URL and we'll take a look.