Product

Changelog

BenchPath is a data operation, not a directory — this is the running record of what shipped and when. Dates mirror the actual release history.

2026-10-02Data

Verified appointment dates now cover the federal courts in Florida and Texas

Appointment dates now appear for 199 federal judges in Florida and Texas. The 176 district and circuit judges are dated by the commission the Federal Judicial Center records for each of them, and the date's note quotes the Center's record and links to it, never presenting it as the court's own page. Among magistrate and bankruptcy judges, 23 are dated where their court's own page states the appointment.
Each date was checked live on the day it was recorded. A federal judge whose court's page gives no appointment date, or who serves on recall after retiring, shows nothing rather than a guess.

2026-10-02Data

Verified appointment dates now cover Texas

Appointment dates now appear for 37 Texas judicial officers, among them justices of the Supreme Court and the courts of appeals, district judges, justices of the peace and associate judges. As in Florida, each date comes from the court's own page, checked live on the day it was recorded, and keeps the precision the court published.
Texas elects most of its judges, and most Texas court pages give no appointment date. Where the page records an election, dates only when a judge took office, or publishes no date, the judge's page shows nothing rather than a guess.

2026-10-02Data

Verified appointment dates now cover Florida's trial and appellate courts and its magistrates

Appointment dates now appear for 162 Florida judicial officers, among them trial judges, judges of the District Courts of Appeal, all seven justices of the Supreme Court, and magistrates and hearing officers. Each date comes from the court's own page or the chief judge's appointing order, checked live on the day it was recorded, and keeps the precision the court published.
Where the court's page records an election, dates only when a judge took office, or publishes no date, the judge's page shows nothing rather than a guess. Senior judges serve by assignment, not appointment, so their pages show no appointment date.
Reading every court page also surfaced changes the courts have made to their rosters, such as judges BenchPath does not yet list and pages a court has removed; each is queued for review with the court's own evidence.

2026-10-02Data

Verified appointment dates begin appearing on judge pages, Palm Beach first

A judge's page now shows when the judge was appointed to the current seat — but only where the court's own page states it, checked live on the day it was recorded, and only at the precision the court published: a year stays a year, a month stays a month. The court's own sentence and a link to its page sit one click away. Judges the court records as elected, and judges whose court publishes no date, show nothing rather than a guess.
The first circuit done is the Fifteenth (Palm Beach): all 52 trial judges' official pages were checked, and nine carry a published appointment date. The rest of Florida follows circuit by circuit, then Texas.

2026-10-02Major

Fix: Judge Intelligence Reports opens again for signed-in accounts

benchpath.ai/workspace/judge-reports failed with an error for every signed-in account since the page shipped on October 1; signed-out visitors were unaffected. The judge finder on that page now links to the report card without the construct that broke it, and an automated check now inspects every server page for the same class of mistake before anything ships.

2026-10-02Major

The public pages adopt the workbench's button grammar; the workbench prints cleanly

Every primary button on the public pages — the homepages, explorers, directories, search, dossiers, reports, pricing and account — now uses the workbench's gold fill with navy text, the same control you use inside the workspace. Nothing else about those pages changed: same layout, same copy, same speed.
Printing a page of the workbench leaves the sidebar, top bar and footer out; the Deadline Calculator prints its computed table and citations without the form or the side rail. This completes the Professional Workbench upgrade program's seven build phases; the language control remains as it was, by decision.

2026-10-02Major

Coverage & Alerts in the workbench, and the same workbench proven for every state

benchpath.ai/workspace/coverage brings your alert inbox, everything you follow, your state's coverage and the public change log together: filter alerts by what needs attention (derived from the source monitor's own change type and labelled as such), by source type and by window, and open the official source behind every alert in one click. Other states show their live counts or an honest "in preparation" — never a made-up percentage.
The Texas workbench is now proven to be the same interface as the Florida one: an automated parity check renders every workspace page for both states and confirms each binds to its own state's data with identical structure, and the accessibility census audits every workspace page as the Texas workbench too.

2026-10-02Major

Workflow Packs and the Deadline Calculator move into the workbench, with saved deadline sets and matter checklists

benchpath.ai/workspace/workflows lists the motion workflow packs inside the workbench — a pack counts for your state only when its steps cite that state's verified rules — with a featured pack, filters by category and state, and a checklist for any pack that you can track on one of your matters: every tick is saved with who checked it and when.
benchpath.ai/workspace/deadlines builds a source-cited deadline table from your state's verified deadline rules, scoped by county and case type and computed under the state's own time-computation rule with its registered court holidays — the same engine the matter page uses. Save the set to your account, bind it to a matter to keep its checklist, and export it as an .ics file for Google Calendar or Outlook, print it, or copy a link. Inputs the engine does not implement, such as a service-method adjustment, are not offered rather than guessed.

2026-10-02Major

Signing in now opens the Professional Workbench

Sign in lands on benchpath.ai/workspace — the sidebar workbench with your Overview, search, saved searches, judges and judge reports — instead of the account page. The header's signed-in links, the account menu, the phone drawer and the account page itself all lead there; a link that sent you to sign in still returns you to the page you came from.

2026-10-01Major

Judges & Divisions and Judge Intelligence Reports move into the workbench

benchpath.ai/workspace/judges is the judges directory inside the workbench: your state's circuits, counties and verified judges counted live, the quick find, a county bench browser with sort and paging whose rows open the dossier or a comparison, the featured judge of the day, and a Judge Intelligence card listing the analysis skills that are live today.
benchpath.ai/workspace/judge-reports keeps the judges you follow and the analyses you have saved in one list — filterable, sortable, each row saying whether the profile is ready or under re-verification — beside a report card with Overview, Filing Requirements, Deadlines, Division Notes and Sources tabs over the same source-cited data as the public dossier. Save, Share and View full report sit on the card; the credit tile reads your account's report entitlement. Appointment dates are deliberately absent: BenchPath shows that fact only once a verification program has sourced it judge by judge.

2026-10-01Major

Workspace search, and saved searches that follow you to every device

benchpath.ai/workspace/search brings the rule search into the workbench: the same instant search, filters and source-cited results, with a rail that mirrors the live filters, saves the search to your account, sets a change alert, and links the matter, the judges and the workflow pack that belong with it.
benchpath.ai/workspace/saved-searches keeps your saved searches on your account — pinned first, with their state and alert status, a live preview of the newest matching rule, and a one-click import of the searches this browser saved before today. A saved search with an alert gets an hourly digest in your inbox when the official sources behind its results change, each digest linking to the source that moved.

2026-10-01Major

The Professional Workbench opens: a workspace shell and an Overview for every state

benchpath.ai/workspace is the first workspace page — a sidebar workbench with the Overview dashboard: your saved searches, judge analyses, unread alerts and the live coverage of your state, the newest matter's packet summary, the four-step roadmap and your recent documents. Signed-out visitors see the frame and a sign-in prompt; nothing on the page is a placeholder number.
The workbench is generated per state from one component tree: a Florida workbench and a Texas workbench are the same interface bound to their own data, and the switcher at the top of the sidebar moves between them. Search, saved searches, judge reports, workflow packs, the deadline calculator and coverage move into the workspace in the phases that follow; until then each entry opens the existing page for that purpose.

2026-09-30Major

Security: the web framework patched the same day an advisory named its image renderer

A critical advisory published on 2026-09-30 named a remote-code-execution flaw in the Next.js Open Graph image renderer that BenchPath's share-card images use. The framework moved from 16.3.5 to 16.3.8 the same day, with the full release gate re-run, and the dependency audit that runs on every commit is clean again.

2026-09-30Major

Florida: the state address is the full Florida homepage; the circuit grid moves to its own explorer

benchpath.ai/florida now renders the full Florida homepage — the live judge dossier, the statistics, the corpus and coverage bands, the county map, verified rules, the flagship report and the AI filing-rules tracker — exactly as benchpath.ai/texas does for Texas. Until today the Florida address showed only the circuit and county grid, so the state switcher and the Florida entry in the navigation landed on a partial page.
The Florida circuit and county grid has its own address at benchpath.ai/florida/explorer, mirroring the Texas and California explorers; the coverage map, the command palette and the sitemap point there.

2026-09-27Major

California: the state page foundation, built exactly as Texas was

benchpath.ai/california is a real address: the California state page, its explorer, its AI filing-rules tracker with CSV export, and a clickable coverage map of the state's 58 counties are built as exact twins of the Texas surfaces — and every one stays gated behind California's states row. Until the California corpus clears the standard Florida and Texas launched with, the page says "in preparation" and the explorer and tracker are not public.
The site chrome now knows three states: the state switcher, the footer tag, the command palette's shortcuts and the state-scoped search and judge directories resolve to California the same way they resolve to Texas, and California records will carry their own ca- prefix so nothing can be mistaken for a Florida or Texas record.

2026-09-27Major

Texas complete: every county stated as covered; the rules API hardened; the brief check speaks Texas

All 254 Texas counties are covered, and every page now says so — the Texas home, the explorer, the AI filing-rules tracker, the coverage ledger, the roadmap and the site description no longer describe queued counties.
The public rules API and the search page's refresh answered an error for Texas-scoped requests since the evening of 2026-09-26 because a stored citation carried a line break; the API now reads every citation as one line, and the stored citations are being normalised.
The professional brief check recognises Texas reporters (S.W.2d, S.W.3d) and Texas rule citations, points to the Texas statutes and rules publications, and says plainly that its corpus cross-check exists only for Florida opinions today.
Reviewer notes on rule pages name a custody file by its hash instead of an internal file path; the review-queue page shows the true count of healthy sources; the source registry and county pages no longer cache an empty page after a transient database error.
The AI filing-rules tracker's registry sweep of 2026-09-27 found 45 AI-titled registrations across Texas, every one receipted; the tracker's answer for the whole state is now stated on the page.

2026-09-27Data

Florida: rule pages rebuilt into whole sentences, duplicates merged, orders against private individuals removed

Seventy-one Florida rule pages that had been cut at line and page breaks now publish whole sentences, quoted from the court's own document — among them the Eighth Circuit's administrative orders and judges' practice preferences in the Sixth and Fourteenth Circuits. Copies of statewide rule books that a circuit posts — the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, the Florida Rules of Juvenile Procedure, the Florida Probate Rules and the statewide appellate court procedures — are no longer published as if they were that court's own rules.
One hundred forty-one duplicate copies of Fourth Circuit administrative orders were merged into the page for the same order that carries every one of their sentences. Where two copies each carry sentences the other lacks, both stay.
Thirty-eight Fourth Circuit orders directed at named private individuals — vexatious-litigant designations, filing restrictions and show-cause orders — are no longer published: they concern one person, not practice before the court.
A Thirteenth Circuit family judge's rule that no final hearing or trial is scheduled unless mediation took place within the past six months is quoted again, as the judge's page prints it.

2026-09-26Data

Florida: multi-part requirements shown whole, or not at all

The Florida counterpart of Texas's correction: in seventy-three Florida rules, a requirement that lists several parts had shown its opening and only its first part. Fourteen now quote the whole sentence as the court's own document prints it — for example, every allegation a petition for the return of firearms must make in the Sixth Circuit, the four things a Southern District of Florida judge requires with a motion for default judgment, and every item a notice of a remote proceeding must contain. Where the rest of a sentence could not be quoted from the rule's own source — a list item cut from its opening, a recital, a page torn from a larger rule book, or a source that is no longer reachable — the partial text was removed. One rule that held nothing but such a fragment is no longer published.

2026-09-26Data

Topic pages that no longer file "immediately" under mediation, and four Texas questions settled

Rule pages are grouped by topic from the words their sentences use, and the Mediation & settlement topic matched "mediate" inside words such as "immediately". Fifty-seven sentences in Texas federal judges' procedures that sat on mediation pages now sit on the judge's matching topic page — emergency motions, filing, hearings and scheduling, chambers procedures and others. Eleven mediation pages that held no mediation sentence at all now redirect to the page that received their sentences, and nine topic pages were added. No published sentence was changed or removed. Forty-nine Florida administrative orders filed under Mediation for the same reason are now filed where the same topic map places them.
Gray County's list of its elected officials names Connie Ogle as Justice of the Peace for Precincts 2 and 4, and her record is now confirmed. The North Texas Child Protection Court's associate judge is now spelled Stephani Logue, as the State Bar of Texas, the state's child-protection-court directory and the court's own dockets spell it; the old address redirects.
Victoria County's district courts' instructions to self-represented parties in divorce cases, which the county's new website had not appeared to carry, are in the county's document center byte for byte; the rule links the new address and is confirmed again. Bowie County's own directory lists its Justice of the Peace Precinct 4 as closed, which is why that court and its former judge are not published.

2026-09-26Data

Texas federal judges: procedures from scanned orders, and multi-part requirements shown whole

Twenty-eight more rule pages publish Texas federal judges' own procedures that the courts post only as scanned orders, transcribed by eye from the page images and checked in a second pass — among them the first published procedures for Judges David Counts, Henry J. Bemporad, John D. Rainey and Miguel A. Torres. The lane now covers eighty-eight judges on four hundred and ninety-nine pages. A sentence with any word that could not be read, a form, a worked example or a table is not published.
Requirements that list several steps now publish every step: nine pages had shown a list's opening and only its first item — for example, a sealing procedure that showed only "move for leave to do so" — and now quote the whole sentence as the judge's document prints it. Recitals and a standing order's explanatory commentary no longer appear as requirements.
A time-payment-fee deadline in an Aransas County justice court's standing orders that had shown an unreadable number now reads "10TH", read from the court's registered scan.

2026-09-26Data

Texas: every judge's verification page, confirmed and corrected benches, and three new judges

Every published Texas judge now shows the official page the judge was verified from: eighteen that showed none now cite the Office of Court Administration's current judicial-directory page that names them, and seven regional child-support and child-protection judges' assignments now cite that page instead of the directory's front page.
Seven judges held at medium confidence were confirmed — five from their counties' own records (commissioners-court minutes and agendas, the county's own pages, a court's registered local rules) and two whose county or court publishes no page naming the officer, from the state's judicial directory (one also from the Governor's announcement of her service). Two county judges serving while an elected county judge is suspended now read "Acting County Judge". Five other judges stay at medium confidence with their open questions recorded.
Four judges whom no current official source names in their seats are no longer published: a justice of the peace whose precinct Bowie County now lists as closed (the precinct's court is unpublished with her), two child-protection associate judges whose courts' own posting dockets name their successors, and a justice of the peace who resigned in 2025. Their successors — Versel Rush (Child Protection Court of the Permian Basin), Sandra Self (Taylor County Child Protection Court) and Melinda Martinez (Sterling County justice of the peace) — were added.
Senior U.S. District Judge Frank Montalvo of the Western District of Texas, whom the court's current order assigning its business names, is published, and the Eighth Court of Appeals' ADR procedures — including its ten-day deadline for objecting to an ADR referral — now publish verbatim.

2026-09-26Data

Texas: federal judges' own procedures, every judge's current seat, and forty-eight more courts

Four hundred and seventy-one rule pages now publish the procedures eighty-four Texas federal district and bankruptcy judges post on their courts' own websites — chambers, hearing, discovery, exhibit and filing requirements — quoted sentence by sentence from the judge's own page or document, under the court's own section headings where it prints them. Forms, sample orders, court-wide orders and documents that name no judge are not published, and scanned documents without a reliable text layer wait for transcription.
Every published Texas state judge now shows a current assignment: seven hundred and twenty-eight dossiers that had read "No current assignment on record" now name the judge's court and county, taken from the court each judge was already verified to.
Forty-eight Title IV-D child-support courts, child-protection courts and county magistrate, children's and associate-judge benches were added, and sixty-four associate judges, magistrates and masters who had been attached to no court now sit on their courts. Four Tarrant County criminal-law magistrates, a Lavaca County justice of the peace (medium confidence, confirmation pending) and a bankruptcy judge recalled to the Eastern District of Texas were added, and a duplicate record was retired.
Nine Southern District of Texas judges' official portraits now show on their dossiers — the only Texas federal court whose judge pages carry them.

2026-09-26Data

Florida's federal courts: local rules for all six trial courts, and corrected text for two of them

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida (forty-nine rules, among them its admiralty rules) and Florida's three U.S. Bankruptcy Courts — the Northern District (sixty-nine rules), the Middle District (seventy-four) and the Southern District (eighty-three) — now publish their local rules verbatim from each court's official rule book, each rule linking the page of the court's PDF where it prints. The Northern District bankruptcy court's Local Rule 4004-1 publishes with subsection (A) as the court's Administrative Order 24-003 amended it effective December 1, 2024, which the court's rule book does not yet print; the rule says so and links the order. Removed rules, forms and appendices are not published, and where a rule's sample caption or table prints in columns plain text cannot carry, the rule says so and links the page.
The Middle District of Florida's forty-two local rules, first published from the court's per-rule web pages, now read from the court's official PDF: two of them (Local Rules 3.03 and 4.01) had shown only the website's navigation links instead of the rule, three had begun mid-sentence, and others carried the website's navigation text or single-word differences from the official text. The Southern District of Florida's sixty-seven local rules already published now read from the same official PDF without the printed page numbers and the court's history notes that had been mixed into their text; its Local Rules 88.2 and 88.3 were added, and seven entries the court's rule book prints only as repealed (Local Rules 3.4 through 3.7, 34.1, 88.4 and 88.6) are no longer published as rules. Each corrected rule says what changed.
A senior judge of the Southern District of Florida whom the court's own list no longer names has retired and is no longer published; the judge's practice-preferences card is archived. The federal bench is now three hundred and nineteen judges, every one of them showing the official page the judge was verified from.

2026-09-26Major

Federal courts: the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, Texas's federal trial benches, and eight hundred and thirty-seven federal court rules

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (twenty-four judges) and the Eleventh Circuit (twenty-two) now publish, and so do Texas's four U.S. District Courts and four U.S. Bankruptcy Courts (one hundred and thirty-six judges) — each judge named by the court's own current list and matched to the Federal Judicial Center's biographical directory, senior status carried on the judge's assignment. Senior judges the court's own list does not name, and nominees confirmed but not yet commissioned, are held. The federal bench, now three hundred and twenty judges, pages by court with a court index; three hundred and nineteen of the federal dossiers link the court page the judge was verified from, and the one other — a senior judge the court's own list no longer names — is under review.
Eight hundred and thirty-seven federal court rules were published verbatim from the courts' official rule books: the Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western Districts of Texas (local civil, criminal and attorney rules, plus the Eastern and Southern Districts' patent rules and the admiralty rules), the four Texas bankruptcy courts' local rules, and the Fifth and Eleventh Circuit rules. Each rule links the page of the official PDF where it prints; repealed, deleted and superseded rules are not published, and the circuits' internal operating procedures are not rules and are not published. Where a rule's chart prints its marks in columns plain text cannot carry, the rule says so and links the chart's page.
One hundred and thirty-one Florida federal dossiers that had presented the court's directory as the judge's own page now link the judge's own court page, and an internal scope note that had been showing as chambers notes on forty-one of them is gone. A federal judge's case-law search now covers that judge's own federal courts and circuit. Five hundred and fifty-two Texas state judges' dossiers gained their "Verified from" link, and twenty-two Texas assignment cards that had been hidden now show. Pages 28 to 54 of the state trial-court judge directory and pages 10 to 18 of the source registry, which had answered not-found, load again.

2026-09-25Data

Ninth Administrative Judicial Region: forty-five Panhandle and South Plains counties go live, and every Texas county is covered

Every county of the Ninth Administrative Judicial Region — Lubbock, Potter, Randall, Hale, Gray, Moore and the thirty-nine others — is now covered: one hundred and ninety-six court rows (district courts row per served county, constitutional county courts, courts at law, justice courts, Lubbock County's associate-judge benches and the region's child-support, child-protection and foster-care courts) and one hundred and sixty-three judges verified against the Office of Court Administration's records and the counties' own pages, one hundred and sixty-two at high confidence and one at medium with an open review task. With the Ninth, the last of Texas's eleven regions, all two hundred and fifty-four Texas counties are covered.
One hundred and forty-two county rules and standing orders and the region's Rules of Administration were published verbatim from the registered instruments and the documents the counties and courts post on their own sites — scanned orders transcribed by eye from the print — with every other posting of a registered instrument recorded on the published rule rather than published twice; the artificial-intelligence standing orders of the Gray County Court and of the Armstrong, Potter and Randall district courts and courts at law, and the Lubbock County family-law standing order with its artificial-intelligence provisions, join the Texas AI filing tracker, and forty-three judge-procedure instruments hang on the sitting judge who issued them.
Forty-two official portraits went live across twenty-two counties, forty served from the official host that publishes them and two as first-party mirrors of the official image where the host redirects automated fetches.

2026-09-25Data

Seventh Administrative Judicial Region: thirty-eight West Texas counties go live

Every county of the Seventh Administrative Judicial Region — Taylor, Tom Green, Midland, Ector, Brown, Howard and the thirty-two others — is now covered: one hundred and eighty-four court rows (district courts row per served county, constitutional county courts, courts at law, justice courts, the Howard County Magistrate Court and the region's child-support and child-protection courts) and one hundred and fifty-eight judges verified against the Office of Court Administration's records and the counties' own pages, one hundred and fifty-one at high confidence and seven at medium with an open review task.
One hundred and ninety county rules and standing orders, the region's Rules of Administration and its rules for appeals of court-appointed attorney's fee decisions were published verbatim from the registered instruments and the documents the counties post on their own sites — scanned orders transcribed by eye from the print — with every county-site posting of a registered instrument recorded on the published rule rather than published twice; the 109th District Court's artificial-intelligence standing order joins the Texas AI filing tracker, and fifty-nine judge-procedure instruments hang on the sitting judge who issued them.
Forty-six official portraits went live across seventeen counties, sixteen served from the county's own host and thirty as first-party mirrors of the official image where the county's site refuses automated fetches.

2026-09-20Data

Tenth Administrative Judicial Region: thirty-two East Texas counties go live

Every county of the Tenth Administrative Judicial Region — Smith, Gregg, Hunt, Bowie, Anderson, Harrison, Van Zandt, Wood and the twenty-four others — is now covered: two hundred and thirty-three court rows (district courts row per served county, constitutional county courts, courts at law, justice courts and the associate benches) and two hundred and one judges verified against the Office of Court Administration roster, one hundred and thirty-one at high confidence and seventy at medium with an open review task.
One hundred and eighty-eight county rules and standing orders and the region's rules of administration were published verbatim from the registered instruments and the documents the counties post on their own sites — scanned orders transcribed by eye from the print — with every county-site posting of a registered instrument receipted as a content twin rather than published twice; sixty-four judge-procedure instruments hang on the sitting judge who issued them.
Thirty-two official portraits went live across thirteen counties, eleven served from the county's own host and twenty-one as first-party mirrors of the official image where the county's site refuses automated fetches.

2026-09-17Data

Corrections: case-law updates flowing again, search on the smallest plan, receipts and re-verification

The daily case-law pass had been running for five weeks without being able to write: every new opinion it found was refused at the database boundary and the run still reported success. The writer now holds an enumerated grant, the run fails loudly if a write is refused, and the first repaired run added three hundred and ninety-three appellate opinions with one hundred and eighty-seven trial-judge attributions.
Rule search had been timing out for some visitors on common terms — the single database statement carried six lookups per matching row ahead of the sort and, under the prepared statement's generic plan, evaluated them over every match. Search now resolves the page of matching rule ids first and hydrates only that page. A residual class of the same timeout remained on the new shape and is addressed on 2026-09-21 by planning each search with its actual terms.
Twenty-four Florida rules that had been left at medium confidence without an open review task were read by eye against the court's current page or document and restored to high with the court's current wording; three rows that were only a letterhead or a category label were archived. Four classes of stray text — category-label bullets, two provenance-preamble shapes and the July pilot's page headers — were moved out of the verbatim text on six hundred and seventy rows.
Six hundred and fifty-three stale Florida judges and sixty-eight stale Florida rules were re-verified against their re-fetched official pages; thirty-six judges whose page no longer names them carry an open roster-drift task. The Sixth Region's Texas rules, five Florida statewide-rule summaries (against the September and July 2026 editions of the Rules of Appellate Procedure, General Practice and Judicial Administration, and Small Claims) and four Duval County orders now carry their source-document receipts; five rules whose registered URL answers 404 were moved to medium with a task for the successor document.
Thirteen one-sentence judge-procedure rules published on 2026-09-14 were folded, verbatim, into the judge's chambers or courtroom-procedures rule from the same document.

2026-09-11Major

Texas stays with Texas, Florida stays with Florida: state-scoped search, judges and navigation

Search and the judge directory now exist per state — Texas Search, Texas Judges, Florida Search and Florida Judges — and the navigation bar, the drawer, the footer and the command palette send you to the state you are standing in. A Texas visitor who opens Search or Judges stays in Texas, with Texas rules and Texas judges only; a Florida visitor stays in Florida the same way. The all-states search and directory remain available for anyone who wants both states side by side, and they now say so: the directory count is labelled Florida and Texas, and every county in its jump list carries its state, so the eight county names the two states share (Duval, Clay, Calhoun, Orange, Polk and the rest) can no longer be confused.
The site also remembers which state you came from: pages that belong to neither state — Intelligence, Pricing, Compare, Coverage — keep wearing the state you last visited instead of falling back to Florida. Nothing about the data changed; every Texas record already lived under its own namespace and this release closes the navigation paths that blended the two.

2026-09-14Data

Corrections: official pages on every Texas judge dossier, portraits restored, OCR spacing repaired

Every published Texas judge dossier now carries its official link: the judge's own page where the court or county publishes one (the El Paso, Kendall, Gillespie, Val Verde and Hidalgo employee directories; the Kerr, Cameron, Wharton, Matagorda, Brazoria, Galveston and Johnson court pages) and otherwise the document the entry was verified against (the Office of Court Administration's judicial roster or the county's court index). Each link sits on a reviewed, hash-receipted projection, and a projection that points at a verification document says so instead of calling it the judge's own page. Judge Ricardo A. Samaniego's biography is published verbatim from El Paso County's page — the one biography the Sixth Region's official sites carry.
Seventeen official portraits — El Paso, Kendall, Val Verde, Chambers and Bee — had stopped rendering because those counties' sites answer browsers but stall automated fetches; each capture was re-fetched, hashed, decoder-checked and read by eye, and is now served from BenchPath's own copy of the county file, byte-identical. A daily probe now requests one portrait per source host so a host that begins blocking is noticed the same day rather than on the next audit.
Two hundred and two published rules carried optical-character-recognition spacing defects in their text layers — "ofthe", "inthe", "wi th", "tlie" and the like — that survived earlier hash-based re-verification because the defect is in the source PDF's own text layer; each token was repaired to its unambiguous reading and the change recorded on the rule. Thirty-six rules whose text layers are damaged beyond token repair (scanned typewriter-era orders, one redlined preference page) were moved to medium confidence with a note on the record and a queued re-read against the print.
The nine thousand two hundred and fifty-three rules whose verbatim block opened with a BenchPath provenance sentence ("Verbatim from the order, captured …") now carry that sentence in the provenance record beneath the text, so the block the page presents as the court's text begins with the court's words and page descriptions no longer start with it.
One hundred and forty-two stale Florida rules were re-verified by finding their sentences verbatim on the re-fetched official page (or in the document the page links), and four hundred and forty-three Florida judges by their full name on the official page; twenty-one judges whose page no longer names them are open review leads rather than stamps.
Thirty-four Fifth Region (Rio Grande Valley) portraits went live — Hidalgo County's employee-directory profile pictures and Cameron County's court-page photographs — and forty-two judge-specific procedure rules were published for nine Florida judges who had none, composed sentence by sentence from the procedures their own official pages link.
Fifty-one chambers-procedure rules for eleven federal judges (S.D. Fla., M.D. Fla. and the Middle District bankruptcy bench) — page limits, discovery-motion mechanics, hearing registration — and forty-five current Eighth Circuit administrative orders were published from the circuit's own index; one thousand five hundred and seventy-six instruments the circuits' indexes link were taken into custody for the next lanes.
The same enrichment then ran for Texas. A census of every published Texas judge's own official page and every registered index found the procedure documents the courts publish that BenchPath held nowhere; thirty-six were published whole from the document as posted — Collin County's discovery-control-plan and scheduling-order forms for the 199th, 296th, 429th, 469th, 471st and 494th District Courts with each judge's filing instructions, the Travis County guidelines, expectations and standing orders of the 250th, 299th, 345th, 390th, 403rd and 459th District Courts, the Business Court's Third and Eleventh Division forms, Fort Bend's 328th pre-trial checklist and 505th Zoom procedures, the Burnet, Grayson and Hays justice-court rules of procedure and decorum, and court policies in Dallas, Guadalupe, Fayette, Kerr and Wilson Counties. Twenty-one judges gained their first judge-specific rule; fifty-five candidates were declined by eye as twins of rules already published, statewide rules reposted by a court, superseded editions, ended emergency instruments or records that are not rules of practice, and Burnet County's 2023 justice-court edition was archived behind the June 2024 edition the county posts.
One hundred and forty-seven Texas judges' official portraits went live from their own pages — every justice and judge of the Courts of Appeals, the Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals whose portrait the courts publish, and fifty-one trial judges across twenty-three counties. Each image was fetched, hashed, decoder-checked and read by eye beside the page's own caption; fifty-two candidate images were rejected, most because the page captions them with another official's name. Texas judges with an official image: 359 → 506.
Forty-five Texas court rules whose own text names the sitting judge — standing orders, rules of practice and policies in Fort Bend, Harris, Galveston, Wise, Aransas, Bosque, Clay, Wichita and Young Counties — now sit on that judge's dossier, joined only where the document names the judge with a title or the judge's own name; seven Dallas County criminal district judges' dossiers now link the criminal district court page that names them rather than the county criminal court page of the same number.
The documents the Texas census could not read by machine were read by eye: scanned orders were drafted with an optical-character-recognition pass and every page compared against the print before a word was published, damaged text layers were inspected line by line, and the three county sites that refuse automated visitors were read in a browser session. Twenty-four rules followed — Grayson County's justice-court policies on emergency protective orders and courtroom conduct, Grimes County's courtroom protocol, the 225th District Court's docket control orders, Collin County Court at Law No. 3's criminal docket standing order, the Kerr County Court at Law's appointed-counsel fee schedule, the 130th District Court's pretrial checklist, the Denton probate courts' standing order on artificial intelligence and positions on testate estates, court policies and remote-hearing procedures in Dallas, Collin and Travis Counties, the 306th District Court's docket control orders and Justice of the Peace Precinct 1's dress code in Galveston County, the Brazoria district courts' remote-appearance information and the Navarro County justice courts' rules of procedure and decorum. Five Johnson County judges' official portraits, captured in the same browser session, are served from BenchPath's own copies.

2026-09-13Major

Texas: the Sixth Administrative Judicial Region, 26 counties (El Paso, the Trans-Pecos and the Hill Country)

All twenty-six counties of the Sixth Region (El Paso, Kerr/Kerrville, Kendall/Boerne, Medina, Uvalde, Val Verde/Del Rio, Gillespie/Fredericksburg, Bandera, Brewster/Alpine, Culberson, Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, Presidio, Pecos, Reagan, Sutton, Crockett, Upton, Kinney, McCulloch, Mason, Menard, Kimble, Edwards, Real and Terrell) are live: 169 courts, 155 judges including the region's child-protection, child-support, associate and magistrate officers, and every registered local rule and standing order composed verbatim from the Supreme Court of Texas's TOPICs registry — 87 of 87 rule-class registrations accounted for as a rule or a record. Seven counties register no local rules of their own and are governed by the region's 2016 Rules of Administration and Procedure, which are published as the region instrument with the 1997 edition archived behind a redirect.
Several courts' filings carried font-glyph corruption, scanned execution pages or no text layer at all; each such document was recomposed to its visual text page by page from the rendered PDF, signatures and file stamps bracketed, and instruments a multi-county court re-files per county — the 198th and 216th, the 38th, the 112th and the 394th District Courts — were transcribed once from the cleanest copy and bound to each served county after the twin was confirmed by title and signature.
The region's artificial-intelligence filing regimes joined the Texas tracker: the 394th District Court's updated 2026 standing order, filed for Jeff Davis, Hudspeth and Brewster, and the Hudspeth County Court's 2024 order; the superseded 2023 and 2024 editions are kept as records. Twenty-nine judges' official portraits were published from the counties that carry them (El Paso, Kendall, Kerr, Gillespie, Val Verde, Culberson, McCulloch, Terrell, Medina and Brewster); the other counties publish no judge photographs and none were fabricated.

2026-09-10Major

Texas: the Fifth Administrative Judicial Region, 11 counties (Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi)

All eleven counties of the Fifth Region (Hidalgo/Edinburg, Cameron/Brownsville, Nueces/Corpus Christi, Starr, Kleberg, Jim Wells, Willacy, Duval, Brooks, Jim Hogg and Kenedy) are live: 136 courts, 140 judges including the region's child-protection, child-support, associate and magistrate officers, and every county's registered local rules and standing orders composed verbatim from the Supreme Court of Texas's TOPICs registry — 30 of 30 registrations accounted for as a rule or a record, with two statewide e-filing orders, a municipal policy, two case-specific orders and a superseded edition kept as records rather than published as county rules.
The counties' own sites added what the registry does not carry: the Cameron district courts' in-person and CourtCall notices and the 444th's final-divorce-hearing order, Hidalgo's Fair Defense Act local rules (effective January 1, 2024), County Court at Law No. 10's family standing order, County Court at Law No. 4's local rules and the 2013 e-filing orders, the 229th District Court's plea protocol, appointment rules and in-person notice for Starr and Jim Hogg, Jim Wells' cash-bond order, Kenedy's justice-court decorum, trial and youth-diversion instruments and Duval's justice-court instructions — each carrying the sha256 receipt of the file as fetched.
The 1979 Rules of the Fifth Administrative Judicial Region and the region's attorney-fee appeal rules were published as region-level instruments with their dates on their face; the Hidalgo Probate Court No. 2 seat created in 2025 and the current Hidalgo administrative judge were carried from live official records where the annual roster still lagged. No artificial-intelligence filing regime exists in the region's instruments — the tracker's Texas count is unchanged.

2026-09-08Major

Texas: the Fourth Administrative Judicial Region, 22 counties (South Texas)

All twenty-two counties of the Fourth Region (South Texas — Bexar/San Antonio, Webb/Laredo, Victoria and the surrounding counties down to the border) are live: courts, benches, and every county's registered local rules and standing orders composed verbatim from the Supreme Court of Texas's TOPICs registry, published county by county at verified canary-then-bulk closes, with every one of the region's 225 registrations accounted for as a rule or a record.
Shared multi-county district instruments were composed once and bound per served county — the 36th/156th/343rd, 81st/218th, 24th/135th/267th, 49th and 293rd/365th district families — from the courts' own sites where the registry carries nothing, so the eight zero-registration counties publish the standing orders and procedures that actually govern them rather than an empty shelf. Bexar's own layer adds the civil district courts' July 1, 2026 local rules, the per-court procedures and limine orders, the probate courts' administrative orders and the county courts at law's orders.
The region's AI-filing tracker gained the South-Texas regimes — the six-county district courts' Standing Order Regarding Use of Artificial Intelligence (Calhoun, DeWitt, Goliad, Jackson, Refugio and Victoria) with its certification form, and Bexar County's civil district courts' AI certification (Rule 4.O.1) with the approved certificate. The Fourth Region's 1993 Regional Rules of Administration were recomposed instrument-true from the region's own print and published, the recon-era duplicate archived with a successor pointer, and the region's child-protection, child-support and Bexar magistration officers added.

2026-09-06Major

Texas: the Third Administrative Judicial Region, 27 counties (Central Texas)

All twenty-seven counties of the Third Region (Central Texas — Travis/Austin, Williamson, Hays, Bell, McLennan, Comal, Guadalupe and the surrounding counties) are live: courts, benches, and every county's registered local rules and standing orders composed verbatim from the Supreme Court of Texas's TOPICs registry, published county by county at verified canary-then-bulk closes.
Shared multi-county district instruments were composed once and bound per served county (the 33rd/424th, 82nd, 25th/2nd-25th, 220th and Caldwell/Comal district families); administrative orders — visiting-judge assignments, case-assignment and referral orders, judicial appointments, fee and deposit schedules, superseded and expired editions — were kept as records under the records-versus-rules and fee-table doctrines; and the three zero-registration counties (Austin, Hill, Milam) are published honestly as benches-only.
The region's AI-filing tracker gained the Central-Texas regimes — the 25th/2nd-25th District Courts' generative-AI verification order (Colorado, Guadalupe and Lavaca), the Hays County Courts at Law's AI-disclosure order for probate and guardianship filings, and the 82nd District Court's prohibition on AI use without a prior order. The Third Region's Rules of Administration were recomposed instrument-true from the region's own print and published, its recon-era duplicate archived with a successor pointer, and the region's child-protection and child-support associate judges added.

2026-09-06Major

Texas: the Eighth Administrative Judicial Region, 18 counties (Fort Worth)

Tarrant, Denton, and the sixteen mid-ring and rural counties of the Eighth Region are live: courts, benches, local rules and standing orders composed from each county's own site and the Supreme Court of Texas's TOPICs registry, with verified judge portraits and effective-date truth, published county by county at verified closes.
The region's AI-filing tracker gained the Fort Worth-region regimes — Tarrant's criminal-courts Local Rule 5.33, the 90th District Court's certification order for Young and Stephens, and the Denton, Wise, Wichita, Erath and Cooke regimes — each a signed certification that a human verified the AI-generated content, several also barring AI use and recording in the courtroom.
The Eighth Region's Rules of Administration were recomposed instrument-true from the region's own print and published, and its recon-era duplicate archived with a successor pointer; the region's seven child-protection and child-support associate judges were added; and pure fee schedules were kept as records under the fee-table doctrine.

2026-09-05Major

Complete audit fix program: region pages, records versus rules, API keys, directory filters

Texas region pages list their benches under Texas titles — district judges, county-level judges, justices of the peace, associate judges — and report their exact bench; the eight Texas regions with no published bench say so and stay out of the sitemap.
Two hundred sixty-three First Circuit and Fifth Circuit documents were re-read from the courts' own files: 143 case-specific orders, referee appointments, forms and postings left the rules corpus as records, and 120 First Circuit orders and directives now carry the number and subject printed on their first page.
API-key creation is labeled as pending activation on this deployment; the judge directory API accepts state and county filters; report copy quotes the free-report schedule instead of a fixed number; case-law scans on Texas judges run under the Texas court scope; Angelina County's new joint standing order on generative AI (signed September 3, 2026) joined the Texas AI tracker the day after it was registered.
Two duplicate First Circuit judge records merged into the circuit's own listings with permanent redirects, seven vacancy placeholders retired from the bench, thirteen assignment rows added from the courts' own pages, and the review queue now carries a task for every medium-confidence rule, every unexplained portrait gap, and every source whose rules are due for re-verification.

2026-09-02Major

Complete audit, the fix program, and the September 1 new-court wave

A full read-only audit ran twice in one day and every finding was fixed in gated pushes the same day: Texas dossiers now resolve their appellate court through the county-to-court-of-appeals junction under Tex. Gov't Code § 22.201 instead of a Florida district; the free early-access window closed at the database, as /pricing already said; the claims registry was re-verified; and the self-represented and kiosk county pickers pin to Florida.
Texas courts that opened on September 1, 2026 joined the record from the Governor's own appointment releases: the 490th District Court (Brazoria County) and the 513th, 514th, and 515th District Courts (Harris County), each with its first judge and an effective-dated assignment.
Database types regenerated from the live schema, the database-grants oracle now runs on every push, and a repository-wide guard refuses the PostgREST embed shape that silently disabled a filter.

2026-09-01Data

Google Scholar cross-check links

Every scan finding and case-law result row links out to Google Scholar's citing-decisions view for that case. Outbound only — BenchPath never fetches Scholar.

2026-08-31Major

The two-state truth sweep

Every Florida-era surface, label, and filter was re-cut for two live states: the Texas bench on county pages, state-qualified county groups, state-true covers and emails, and a corpus stack that shows Texas an honest empty state instead of Florida's numbers.

2026-08-30Data

Texas: the Second Administrative Judicial Region, 22 counties

Montgomery, Jefferson, Brazos, and nineteen more counties of the Second Region: courts, benches, and local rules composed from the counties' own sites and the Supreme Court of Texas's TOPICs registry, with verified portraits and effective-date truth — the 523rd District Court carried its September 1 opening date before it opened.
A Texas homepage and a 254-county coverage map arrived the same day, with state-aware navigation everywhere.

2026-08-29Data

Texas: the First Administrative Judicial Region

Dallas, Collin, Grayson, Rockwall, Ellis, Kaufman, and Fannin counties plus the Business Court's First Division — including four distinct AI-in-court regimes documented from the courts' own standing orders.

2026-08-27Major

Texas is live

The Eleventh Administrative Judicial Region — Harris, Fort Bend, Brazoria, Galveston, Matagorda, and Wharton counties — opened to the public after a twelve-item activation gate: the region's bench, courts, and local rules verified against the courts' own sites and the Office of Court Administration roster.

2026-08-26Data

Federal judges in Florida

Judges of Florida's three U.S. District Courts and their bankruptcy courts, with their courts, practice preferences, and case-law links, published under the same official-source verification discipline as the state bench.

2026-08-16Major

Accessibility program: WCAG 2.2 AA

Every surface re-cut against WCAG 2.2 AA — form primitives, focus management, kiosk timing controls, dialog semantics, reduced-motion respect — with a published Accessibility Conformance Report and a barrier-report form on /accessibility.

2026-08-12Major

Public launch

BenchPath opened publicly with Florida's 20 circuits and 67 counties, and the BenchPath trademark application was filed the same day.

2026-08-11Major

Billing live, post-purchase clarity, and the Newsroom

Billing is live on Square rails: $29 Single Reports and the $99 Professional plan check out with real cards; every purchase is bound to a reserved order and proven by a signed webhook before any access is granted. Founding members keep the rates they locked during early access.
Monthly plans charge per period today — Square catalog subscriptions bring automatic renewal next (see the roadmap). Firm checkout requires an active organization membership by design.
Post-purchase clarity: checkout now lands on a welcome banner that reads your real credit balance from the entitlement store, and the account page gains a report-credits card. Browsing never spends a credit — only the Unlock click does.
The BenchPath Newsroom launched at /news: dated announcements with NewsArticle structured data, a press kit, and a Google News sitemap.

2026-08-09Data

The verified case-law corpus: 2004 → present

Florida appellate opinions held in sha-256 custody from the courts' own publications — the Supreme Court and all six District Courts of Appeal, 2004 through the present. Live totals render on /intelligence.
Trial-judge attribution read from each opinion's own attribution line, quoted verbatim as the receipt and cross-checked county-to-circuit; ambiguous lines are held, never guessed.
Five systematic attribution defects found and fixed — including a pagination cap that had hidden roughly a third of the bench from the matcher — then the whole corpus re-derived and audited.
Judge dossiers now show the appellate opinions that reviewed the judge's cases and, at five or more matched opinions, an appellate-outcome census of the courts' own disposition labels — counts, never rates or predictions.

2026-08-07Major

Professional workbench, self-serve verification, pro se courthouse guides

The Professional Workbench: judge- and motion-calibrated curated reasoning with a dual-AI decision-support lane for verified Florida attorneys — access requires professional verification and explicit attorney confirmation, and every statement must cite the corpus or it is deleted.
Self-serve professional verification: a sworn credential attestation with internal compliance checks; paid memberships carry a $499.99 cancellation fee when requested verification cannot be completed, disclosed at signup and in the Terms.
Pro se courthouse guides expanded to 17 case types across all 67 counties, with appellate and federal routing maps — free, cited, and never legal advice.
Dossiers gain "In the court's own words": verbatim, Bluebook-cited excerpts from hash-verified official slips with plain-language explanations, publishing dossier by dossier through the review gate.
Judicial insights publish through a receipts-first engine: every supported statement carries a source-hashed citation receipt, professional-lane only.

2026-08-06Major

Security hardening wave: deny-by-default data boundary

Database grants rebuilt deny-by-default, with executable authorization matrices replayed in CI on every commit.
Credential rotation to named, opaque server keys; the source monitor authenticates with its own isolated key and secret header.
Same-origin portrait proxy with a validating allowlist; Content-Security-Policy enforced.
Accessibility color-contrast gate re-enabled with zero excluded rules — WCAG 2.2 AA passes by measurement in both themes.
Report meter v2: viewing a report you already unlocked never consumes a credit; unlocks are an explicit, idempotent action.

2026-08-05Major

Live scan, dual-AI consensus, report meter, answer-engine SEO

Live Case-Type Intelligence Scan on every dossier: pick the judge and case type, get Bluebook-cited findings quoting the opinions' own words. Scans that find nothing are never charged; sealed case types are refused with the statute shown.
Dual-AI consensus analysis: two independent engines cross-examine findings — agreements kept, contested points shown, never a prediction.
Premium Judge Reports meter: seven free per account in the first 30 days, then $29 single reports or membership plans; revisiting a generated report never re-counts.
Structured-data wave: Article and Breadcrumb schema on rule pages, OG cards, an Atom feed, IndexNow, and refreshed llms.txt guidance for AI crawlers.

2026-08-03Data

All 20 circuit ledgers closed

Every Florida judicial circuit's administrative-order register closed against the court's own records, each gap named with a dated proof.
The appellate bench joins the directory: the Supreme Court and all six District Courts of Appeal, with portraits or dated no-portrait facts for every published judge.
Statewide verbatim campaign: hundreds of paraphrased records recomposed to verbatim high-confidence text; the remainder archived or held with named evidence.

2026-08-01Major

Ground truth: production integrity & honest records

Self-serve API keys repaired in production: the key-store migration is applied and the migration ledger reads 1:1 again.
Every data-backed route now streams behind a static shell — the H1 paints before the data resolves (LCP closure).
County coverage counts fixed: an unpaginated read was sampling 1,000 of 1,472 published judges, undercounting the map and county pages.
Florida court holidays (2026–2027) registered from the official statewide list — the deadline calculator now excludes them from business-day counting.
Duval Clerk collection payloads (1,116 orders, 344 variants) committed to the evidence vault; this changelog and the roadmap brought back in sync with what actually shipped.
Homepage hero now features top-dossier judges whose courts publish portraits; county rule lists order by what governs today.

2026-07-31Major

Gate closure: accessibility, mobile, LCP, funnels, API keys

axe-core WCAG 2.2 AA sweep: clean in both themes across 10 key routes, zero violations.
390px mobile gate: clean 10/10 after fixing a sources-table overflow.
LCP root cause fixed: entrance animation was suppressing the H1 as an LCP candidate in Chrome.
Typed analytics funnel events and a deterministic device-level experiment framework.
API key self-serve: create, view once, and revoke keys from /settings/api-keys.

2026-07-31Major

Expansion readiness: multi-state, i18n, white-label, kiosk

Multi-state architecture live: DB-driven state switcher and /[state] taxonomy with honest in-preparation pages.
EN/Español/Kreyòl interface chrome on the pro-se wizard — legal content stays English with a per-language notice until certified translations land.
White-label theming primitive demonstrated live on /firms.
/kiosk court-navigator mode for self-help centers: large type, trilingual, 120-second idle reset that retains nothing.

2026-07-31Major

Platform, API & trust amplification

Source Registry becomes a health board: 30-day change counters, per-source 12-week activity sparklines, and a filterable change-event stream.
/developers: full v1 API documentation with a live request console that runs against the real endpoints.
Public changelog and roadmap pages.
PWA shell with offline caching of rule cards, and a published accessibility statement.

2026-07-31Major

Conversion surfaces: homepage 2.0, pricing 2.0, paywall v2

Homepage hero now shows the product: a live, auto-cycling judge dossier built from real published data.
Pricing gains a monthly/annual toggle, a full feature matrix, and an ROI calculator with disclosed assumptions.
The paywall now knows who you are: anonymous visitors and free accounts see different, accurate upgrade paths.
Dynamic social cards for every judge dossier and pro-se roadmap; the sitemap covers judge reports, /compare, and /deadline-calculator.

2026-07-31Major

Workflow: matters 2.0, alerts, watching, compare, pre-flight

Matters become workspaces: packet stats, nearest deadline, and 14-day change counts per matter.
Alerts center with resolved follow names, unread filter, and deep links to the official source that changed.
Watching hub: everything you follow, 30-day change activity, and saved searches.
Compare up to three judges side by side; run a printable pre-flight verification before you file.

2026-07-31Major

Flagship surfaces: judge dossier, coverage map, intelligence

Judge profiles become dossiers: requirements, verified rulings, deadlines, and a downloadable report artifact.
Florida coverage map: all 67 counties with honest coverage status.
AI-governance rules tracker and a deadline calculator.

2026-07-30Major

Core experience: instant search, design system 2.0

Instant search with command palette, toast notification system, and breadcrumbs throughout.
The "BenchPath Marque" design system: brand mark, dark mode, icon system, static-first directories.

2026-07-26Data

Data operation: all 20 circuits re-extracted

240 administrative orders recovered across all 20 Florida circuits; 288 named explicitly as unquotable rather than paraphrased.
4th Circuit closed out: duplicates merged, 41 scans recovered by fresh OCR.

2026-09-14Data

Corrections: official pages on every Texas judge dossier, portraits restored, OCR spacing repaired

Every published Texas judge dossier now carries its official link: the judge's own page where the court or county publishes one (the El Paso, Kendall, Gillespie, Val Verde and Hidalgo employee directories; the Kerr, Cameron, Wharton, Matagorda, Brazoria, Galveston and Johnson court pages) and otherwise the document the entry was verified against (the Office of Court Administration's judicial roster or the county's court index). Each link sits on a reviewed, hash-receipted projection, and a projection that points at a verification document says so instead of calling it the judge's own page. Judge Ricardo A. Samaniego's biography is published verbatim from El Paso County's page — the one biography the Sixth Region's official sites carry.
Seventeen official portraits — El Paso, Kendall, Val Verde, Chambers and Bee — had stopped rendering because those counties' sites answer browsers but stall automated fetches; each capture was re-fetched, hashed, decoder-checked and read by eye, and is now served from BenchPath's own copy of the county file, byte-identical. A daily probe now requests one portrait per source host so a host that begins blocking is noticed the same day rather than on the next audit.
Two hundred and two published rules carried optical-character-recognition spacing defects in their text layers — "ofthe", "inthe", "wi th", "tlie" and the like — that survived earlier hash-based re-verification because the defect is in the source PDF's own text layer; each token was repaired to its unambiguous reading and the change recorded on the rule. Thirty-six rules whose text layers are damaged beyond token repair (scanned typewriter-era orders, one redlined preference page) were moved to medium confidence with a note on the record and a queued re-read against the print.
The nine thousand two hundred and fifty-three rules whose verbatim block opened with a BenchPath provenance sentence ("Verbatim from the order, captured …") now carry that sentence in the provenance record beneath the text, so the block the page presents as the court's text begins with the court's words and page descriptions no longer start with it.
One hundred and forty-two stale Florida rules were re-verified by finding their sentences verbatim on the re-fetched official page (or in the document the page links), and four hundred and forty-three Florida judges by their full name on the official page; twenty-one judges whose page no longer names them are open review leads rather than stamps.
Thirty-four Fifth Region (Rio Grande Valley) portraits went live — Hidalgo County's employee-directory profile pictures and Cameron County's court-page photographs — and forty-two judge-specific procedure rules were published for nine Florida judges who had none, composed sentence by sentence from the procedures their own official pages link.
Fifty-one chambers-procedure rules for eleven federal judges (S.D. Fla., M.D. Fla. and the Middle District bankruptcy bench) — page limits, discovery-motion mechanics, hearing registration — and forty-five current Eighth Circuit administrative orders were published from the circuit's own index; one thousand five hundred and seventy-six instruments the circuits' indexes link were taken into custody for the next lanes.
The same enrichment then ran for Texas. A census of every published Texas judge's own official page and every registered index found the procedure documents the courts publish that BenchPath held nowhere; thirty-six were published whole from the document as posted — Collin County's discovery-control-plan and scheduling-order forms for the 199th, 296th, 429th, 469th, 471st and 494th District Courts with each judge's filing instructions, the Travis County guidelines, expectations and standing orders of the 250th, 299th, 345th, 390th, 403rd and 459th District Courts, the Business Court's Third and Eleventh Division forms, Fort Bend's 328th pre-trial checklist and 505th Zoom procedures, the Burnet, Grayson and Hays justice-court rules of procedure and decorum, and court policies in Dallas, Guadalupe, Fayette, Kerr and Wilson Counties. Twenty-one judges gained their first judge-specific rule; fifty-five candidates were declined by eye as twins of rules already published, statewide rules reposted by a court, superseded editions, ended emergency instruments or records that are not rules of practice, and Burnet County's 2023 justice-court edition was archived behind the June 2024 edition the county posts.
One hundred and forty-seven Texas judges' official portraits went live from their own pages — every justice and judge of the Courts of Appeals, the Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals whose portrait the courts publish, and fifty-one trial judges across twenty-three counties. Each image was fetched, hashed, decoder-checked and read by eye beside the page's own caption; fifty-two candidate images were rejected, most because the page captions them with another official's name. Texas judges with an official image: 359 → 506.
Forty-five Texas court rules whose own text names the sitting judge — standing orders, rules of practice and policies in Fort Bend, Harris, Galveston, Wise, Aransas, Bosque, Clay, Wichita and Young Counties — now sit on that judge's dossier, joined only where the document names the judge with a title or the judge's own name; seven Dallas County criminal district judges' dossiers now link the criminal district court page that names them rather than the county criminal court page of the same number.
The documents the Texas census could not read by machine were read by eye: scanned orders were drafted with an optical-character-recognition pass and every page compared against the print before a word was published, damaged text layers were inspected line by line, and the three county sites that refuse automated visitors were read in a browser session. Twenty-four rules followed — Grayson County's justice-court policies on emergency protective orders and courtroom conduct, Grimes County's courtroom protocol, the 225th District Court's docket control orders, Collin County Court at Law No. 3's criminal docket standing order, the Kerr County Court at Law's appointed-counsel fee schedule, the 130th District Court's pretrial checklist, the Denton probate courts' standing order on artificial intelligence and positions on testate estates, court policies and remote-hearing procedures in Dallas, Collin and Travis Counties, the 306th District Court's docket control orders and Justice of the Peace Precinct 1's dress code in Galveston County, the Brazoria district courts' remote-appearance information and the Navarro County justice courts' rules of procedure and decorum. Five Johnson County judges' official portraits, captured in the same browser session, are served from BenchPath's own copies.