Court Rule Searcher

Court Rule Searcher finds the provisions of the Michigan Court Rules that govern your question, then composes an answer from that text alone. It is a retrieval-augmented generation ("RAG") system: rather than asking an artificial intelligence model to answer from whatever it absorbed during training, the system first retrieves the governing text and then instructs the model to write only from it. The model functions less like an expert reciting from memory and more like a clerk directed to answer only from the record placed in front of them.

Why the architecture matters. General-purpose AI systems generate language by statistical prediction, and when asked about law they can produce authority that does not exist — confident, well-formatted, and wrong. The professional consequences of relying on such fabrications are by now well documented. This system forecloses that failure mode structurally rather than by instruction: the model is never asked what it remembers about Michigan procedure. It is shown the pertinent rule text, retrieved verbatim from the official publication, and confined to it.

Confinement is checked rather than assumed. Before any answer reaches you, every citation it contains is tested against the parsed rules — and the result is shown to you, not merely performed:

• Every citation in the answer links to the passage it came from, and every passage links to its printed page in the official PDF (printed page numbers and PDF sheet numbers differ; both are shown).
• The citation audit below each answer reports, for every citation: does that provision exist, and was it among the passages the model was actually shown? A citation the model repeated from inside a passage is labelled exactly that.
• Where the rules do not address a question, the system is designed to say so and to name where the answer likely resides — a statute, court precedent, or a local order — rather than to guess.

The complete Michigan Court Rules: 625 rules and 11,860 citable provisions, parsed from the official publication as amended through July 31, 2026.

It does not cover statutes (MCL), case law, the Michigan Rules of Evidence, or local administrative orders. When an answer depends on those, the system says so rather than guessing — and statutes appearing in an answer are flagged as unverified, because they lie outside the corpus this tool checks.

Sources: the official Michigan Court Rules PDF · rules & administrative orders at courts.michigan.gov

In evaluation against more than a thousand benchmark questions written from the rules themselves, the system produced no fabricated citations, and it declined all thirty-two questions deliberately designed to have no answer in the court rules. Its stored copy of the rules was verified word for word against the official PDF — all 625 rules accounted for, nothing added or paraphrased.

What this does not claim. The architecture minimises fabrication; it does not abolish error. Retrieval can miss a pertinent provision, and composed language can state a rule more broadly than its text supports. That is why every answer carries its sources, why the audit is shown rather than merely performed, and why you are asked to verify against the official rules before relying on anything here.

About this system — the pipeline, the audit, the full measured record, and what was tested and rejected.

Not legal advice. This is an administrative support tool developed by the Child & Adolescent Data Lab at the University of Michigan School of Social Work; it is not a product of, affiliated with, or endorsed by the Michigan courts. It does not create an attorney–client relationship and must not be relied on in any filing or decision. Answers are produced automatically from the text of the Michigan Court Rules and may be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. Always verify against the official Michigan Court Rules published by the Michigan Supreme Court at courts.michigan.gov before acting.

This beta tool is for research and evaluation; it is not a substitute for the official Michigan Court Rules or for advice from a licensed attorney.

An administrative support tool developed by the Child & Adolescent Data Lab at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the Michigan courts. Report errors: beperron@umich.edu.

Searches are retained for quality improvement. Retrieval and the citation audit run against this system's own index; only the final composition step is sent to an external language-model service.