We built the tool we wanted to use before every probate hearing.
he Tentative was started by a trust & estate litigator practicing in Orange County. The premise is simple: tentative rulings are the most predictive document the court produces, and nobody had built a serious tool for them.
Westlaw and Lexis do not index tentative rulings. CourtListener does not go this deep into a single county. The court's own posting pages are PDFs that get overwritten every week — there is no historical record unless someone keeps one. So we kept one.
Today the index covers every probate Law & Motion tentative posted by Departments CM03 through CM08 — every motion type normalized into a controlled taxonomy, every ruling paired with a plain-English summary and analysis, every member receiving a Saturday dispatch. It is the same dataset we use ourselves before every appearance.
Six commitments to the bar.
One county, one practice
OC probate Law & Motion tentatives, indexed deeply. Multi-county and multi-practice are tradeoffs against quality. We pick depth.
Plain data, plainly shown
No marketing fluff. The data — and the analysis written on top of it — is the product.
Built by a litigator
Every page is shaped by the way the dataset is actually used in front of a Law & Motion calendar.
Independent
Not affiliated with the Superior Court of California, the OC Bar, or any law firm. Members fund the tool.
Manual approval
Every member is verified. The point of intelligence is that the other side does not have it.
Source-of-truth respected
Original court PDFs are preserved alongside parsed data. The court is always the source of truth — and tentatives are tentative.
Acquire
PDF from the court
Each department overwrites a single PDF every week. We snapshot each posting and timestamp it.
Parse
Structured records
Each ruling extracted into ROA-aware records. ROA parentheticals preserved as identifiers.
Enrich
Cal Bar + party data
Attorneys matched to Cal Bar numbers. Firms resolved by website domain and shared address.
Index & summarize
Search-ready
Motion types normalized to a controlled taxonomy. Each ruling paired with a summary and analysis, then editor-reviewed before publication.