About Layman's Lawyer
Hi — I'm Jeremy, the founder of Layman's Lawyer.
This started with a simple frustration: I wanted to follow a few court cases as they happened. Not as a lawyer — I'm not one — just as someone who wanted to understand what was actually going on. I found CourtListener, a genuinely great, free archive of court records. But like every court record, it's written in lawyer-speak: dense docket entries, procedural shorthand, filings that assume you already know the language.
So I did what a lot of people quietly do now — I started pasting CourtListener pages into an AI and asking it to explain them to me. It worked, but it was clunky. I was doing the same translation over and over, one filing at a time, and losing the thread of how the case actually moved.
What I really wanted was a dashboard: the plain-English summary right there next to each filing, laid out in the same timeline and structure the court itself uses. Not a reinterpretation of the case — the court’s own sequence of events, just readable. That’s what Layman’s Lawyer is.
Who it's for
Anyone who wants to follow a court case as it moves through the system without needing a law degree to do it — people party to their own case, people following a case in the news, journalists, and the endlessly curious autodidacts who just want to understand how something works. If that sounds like you, this was built for you.
How it works
Layman's Lawyer is powered in part by CourtListener and the Free Law Project's RECAP archive, along with other public court-data sources. We take the official docket and generate plain-language summaries of the filings, plus a timeline you can actually read. Every summary links back to the original document, because the original always controls — these are plain-language explanations, not legal advice.
What we're not
We are not affiliated with PACER, the federal courts, or any court system. We’re an independent tool built on public records to make them easier to follow.
Layman's Lawyer is built and maintained by Garrell Tech Solutions LLC.