Building Court-Ready PDFs: What Legal Tech Taught Me About Deterministic Software

Short summary

Building Pleadwise, a court-document formatting tool, taught the author that legal tech needs deterministic software where precision matters and AI only where variation is useful. Court filings should be structured data with validation, court-specific formatting profiles, and provenance tracking for rules. The final pipeline behaves like a compiler: structured input, validation, rule lookup, assembly, PDF compilation, preflight checks, and user review.

• •Use AI for variation, deterministic software for precision in legal tech
• •Court filings modeled as structured data with court-specific formatting profiles
• •Formatting pipeline acts like a compiler with validation and preflight checks

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.