What used to live in hallway conversations, at your fingertips.
Every defense bar runs on institutional memory: which judge honors plea terms, which prosecutor moves late, which officer falls apart on cross. That knowledge is inconsistent, siloed within a firm, and lost when an attorney leaves. Pretext keeps it in one place, coded so that no one is ever quoted, and shows it beside the case so the attorney can prepare for the room they are walking into.
Coded feedback from member firms, official rosters, and your own private notes.
Judges live
Every trial judge in the state, seeded from the judiciary's own roster. After a case closes, the attorney answers five coded questions, each a scale between two poles:
- Law interpretation: letter of the law to spirit of the law
- Sentencing: harsh to lenient
- Temperament: short fuse to patient
- Defense motions: rarely grants to defense-friendly
- Plea agreements: often deviates to honors terms
Profiles show the distribution across member firms, and your firm's own notes on the judge stay inside your firm.
Prosecutors live
Assistant State's Attorneys, Commonwealth's Attorneys, and Assistant District Attorneys by office and role, with six coded dimensions from the attorneys who have sat across the table:
- Prosecutorial posture: aggressive to measured
- Plea willingness: trial-bound to deal-oriented
- Offer trajectory: holds firm to moves late
- Discovery practices: must pursue to forthcoming
- Mitigation openness: rarely to receptive
- Handshake reliability: get it in writing to word holds
Officers live
Identified by agency, with the Commonwealth's 362 agencies on file for Virginia, and three records on each profile:
- On the stand. Demeanor, whether testimony tracked the report, and whether the court challenged it, coded at case close.
- In the documents. Seven pattern metrics computed from the firm's own analyses: body camera active at the stop, recording continuity, boilerplate narrative, Miranda timing, dispatch versus on-scene timing, time to probable cause, and SFST protocol compliance.
- Brady and Giglio. A dated disclosure record: the prosecution disclosed impeachment material about the officer, or the officer appears on a do-not-call list. Featured on the profile and in the directory.
What happened is shared. Who said it never is.
The shared layer is built so that the informal conversation can be pooled without anyone being quoted, named as the source, or exposed to a defamation claim. That is a compliance control, not a technical nicety.
Structured only, by the database's own rules
Every field in the shared layer is a code, a date, or a number, checked by the database itself. Free text about a named person cannot cross the boundary. There is no column for it to land in.
Anonymous by construction
A rating row carries no identity columns at all. The only link back to the contributing firm is an internal attribution used for contribution metrics and right-to-delete, never exposed to any other firm and never shown on a profile.
One doorway in
Exactly one code path can write to the shared layer, and the application role holds no table privileges there. Data enters only through the structured outcome-coding step at case close.
Your notes stay yours
Free-text notes on a judge, prosecutor, or officer exist, and they are firm-private. Your colleague sees them. No other firm ever does.
Family and disciplinary matters never enter
Opposing parties, children, and a respondent officer in a disciplinary matter are private individuals. Those case types are refused at the pipe entirely.
Grows with every member firm
The rosters are complete from day one. The coded record starts thin and gets sharper with every closed case a member firm codes. We say so plainly, because a profile with three data points should look like a profile with three data points.
Prepare for the environment, not just the facts.
The judge, prosecutor, and officers on a case are linked from the case itself. Before the hearing, the attorney sees the judge's pattern on defense motions and plea terms, the prosecutor's offer trajectory, and whether an officer who will testify has a disclosure on record or a history of testimony that departs from the report. After the hearing, the coding takes two minutes and feeds the next firm's preparation.
See the network from the inside.
Start a two-week trial and open the judge, prosecutor, and officer directories for your state alongside your own cases. Your firm gets its own isolated environment the same day.