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.
Five 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.
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.