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The standard for a sound motion.

The LexGrade Standard is an open, published measure of good legal drafting — 8 principles, 45 criteria. LexGrade applies it to a filing, point by point, and returns a grade.

Every citation is checked against the public court record, and every grade traces to the open Standard.

Sample report · Motion to Compel · DktEntry 26.1
Latest grade · Initial
B− 82 / 100 Competent
Principles
Legal Authority
78
Factual Foundation
90
Writing & Organization
85
Self-Assessment
87
13 of 15 citations verified 2 questioned
Graded against the LexGrade Standard.
Every grade
A–F

a letter grade you can read line by line

The rubric
8 · 45

principles and criteria in the open Standard

The Standard
Open

CC-BY-SA, governed openly · published at lexgrade.org

Every run
Traceable

every score maps back to a rule in the open Standard

Why a grade

A citation can be real and still be wrong.

A genuine decision, cited for something it never said, passes every check for whether it exists. The judge who notices is less forgiving than with an outright fabrication.

The basic check

Existence check

Paste a motion and see where every citation stands.

Does the cited case exist in the public record?
Is the citation written correctly?
Labels each one Verified, Questioned, or Fabricated.

Always free — citation checks are free for every motion, powered by the public record via CourtListener / Free Law Project.

The quality check

PROThe Standard

The judgment a simple real-or-fake check can’t give you.

Does the case actually back up the point you cite it for?
Is the argument built the way the Standard expects?
An honesty-and-candor check, weighed across the whole filing.
Scored across every principle and criterion in the Standard.

→ One clear letter grade, A–F — with notes on every section.

Under the grade

A grade is the surface. This is what’s beneath it.

The letter is one number. Lift it, and a grade is an ordered system — the open Standard at the foundation, each layer above doing one job, up to the letter you act on.

What you see
B−
The grade · what you act on
82 / 100 · Competent · one letter, A–F
Output
Taken apart, layer by layer
15
Every citation
Each one checked against the public court record.
13 / 15 verified
45
Criteria scored
Each principle broken into specific, checkable points.
each traceable
6
Principles weighted
The dimensions of a sound motion, each carrying its share.
weighted to 100
§
The LexGrade Standard
The published rulebook everything above measures against.
CC-BY-SA
What it’s built on

The cycle. The Standard is revised in the open — every grade re-runs against the latest, and past grades stay pinned to their version.

Existence is the easy part

Three citations. Three very different verdicts.

The basic check catches the fake. The grade catches the one that’s real but doesn’t say what the motion claims.

Verified Questioned Fabricated
Verified

Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319 (1976)

Found in the public record · links to the opinion

Fabricated caught on sight

Harrington v. Vance, 781 U.S. 412 (2019) (fabricated — no such case)

Not found in the public record · volume 781 U.S. does not exist

Pro Only the grade catches this
Questioned

Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254 (1970) (real case, wrong point)

The case is real and checks out — but the page cited doesn’t actually say what the motion claims.

See it first

See a full report before you upload a thing.

We’ll email you a complete sample grade — every principle scored, every citation checked, each finding traced to the Standard. No account required.

One email with the sample, plus the occasional launch update. Unsubscribe anytime.

The open Standard

Open by design, and published in full.

Every principle and criterion, openly licensed. The whole rubric — weights, score bands, and techniques — is public at lexgrade.org, where anyone can propose a change. LexGrade is the tool that applies it.

The rubric at a glance 8 principles · 45 criteria
Legal Authority
20%
Factual Foundation
18%
Writing and Organization
12%
Problem Diagnosis
10%
Strategic Sophistication
10%
Self-Assessment
10%
Procedural Integrity
Precond.
Ethics and Candor
Gate
Six principles carry the 100-point score. Two are gates. CC-BY-SA 4.0lexgrade.org

The bigger picture

The product is the wedge. The Standard is the moat.

Most legal-AI tools sell an output. LexGrade owns the measure that output is judged against — published in the open, applied by a commercial engine, and grounded in the public record. That ordering is what compounds.

Category
Own the bar, not just a tool.

A motion's quality gets discussed in the language of the Standard — and we publish that language. The category and the company share a name.

openly licensed · governed in public
Model
Open spec, commercial engine.

The Standard is free at lexgrade.org; the work of applying it — verification, scoring, the report — is the product, and the same engine runs behind the API.

lexgrade.com · Grade API · integrators
Foundation
Built on the public record.

Citations resolve against CourtListener and the Free Law Project — a durable, public data spine, versioned so every grade stays reproducible.

Open source · CC-BY-SA 4.0

Dependable by design

No black box. No surprises.

Open, not opaque

Every score traces to a written criterion in the public Standard.

Checked the same way

Citation verification is deterministic — the same cite resolves against the public record identically, every run.

Caught before the courtroom

Problems surface on screen, not for the first time before a judge.

You stay in control

Nothing is filed or served for you — run a grade on command, and delete any run or document anytime.

For integratorsComing soon

Grade from your own stack.

The same Standard, behind a REST API. Submit a filing, read every finding back as structured JSON, and wire grading into the tools a team already runs.

Grade API Citation API Webhooks
api.lexgrade.com v1
$ curl https://api.lexgrade.com/v1/grade \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer •••" \
    -F file=@motion.pdf

{
  "grade": "B-",
  "score": 82,
  "tier": "competent",
  "citations": { "verified": 13, "questioned": 2 }
}

Hold the filing to the Standard.

Create an account, verify the citations, and grade the motion against the Standard.