We are creating the next generation of filing infrastructure, connective tissue that offers a uniform experience across jurisdictions, meets users where they are, and is as accessible to autonomous systems as it is to humans.
The landscape of litigation has changed dramatically in the last ten years, but the filing story has not kept up.
Lawyers are writing more than ever before. Artificial intelligence is driving the cost of drafting to zero, but the filing process looks the same as it did at the turn of the century. Download documents from the drafting platform, upload them to a separate filing platform, and figure out how this particular court does things. This sufficed in a world where drafting took days or weeks, but today, high volume work is the name of the game. Filing is now the bottleneck.
Practices have gone wide. A litigator who once worked one or two states now files across dozens, and the legal tech built to serve them has followed suit. People need a general solution, where once they could get away with a specialized one.
This used to be a handoff. A lawyer would finish a document and pass it to a legal assistant, who knew the local rules and the filing portal cold. That role is disappearing, and the lawyer is now responsible for filing. Lawyers have never had to do this work before, so it takes them longer than it took their assistants. Their time is also far more expensive. Suddenly, getting filing right has become a cost center.
The idea for Rhetoric came up while building another product, a text editor for lawyers. We wanted to incorporate filing into the experience, so that our users could draft and file in the same place, but found that there was no off-the-shelf solution that we could drop in to our project.
This left us with two choices: build it ourselves or abandon the feature. This is the same fork in the road that other legal tech companies have come to in recent years, and most have chosen to abandon the feature. This is a reasonable choice: the effort it takes to build a robust filing system is enough to derail any roadmap.
The truth is that filing deserves its own roadmap. There is enough complexity in the underlying systems that the problem cannot be tackled in a sprint or a quarter, so it never gets tackled at all. This creates hidden costs for lawyers who are increasingly forced to work with fragmented tools, as described above. It also means missed opportunities for legal tech companies who are unable to participate in this rich economy and who lose the thread once a user leaves their platform.
We decided to make filing our roadmap.
Our mission is to give people a simple and reliable way to file in any court. This applies to lawyers filing under their own name, but also to the drafting software sitting alongside them; the same tools that write a brief should also be able to get it in front of a judge.
Software is already deeply embedded in the litigation lifecycle. It is used to draft briefs, research case law, and review materials. But courts remain a readonly resource for that software. It can pull a docket sheet or check a case status, but it cannot file anything; that last step still needs a human at a keyboard. We want to make courts a writable resource, so that software can fill the gap that assistants left behind.
Every court runs its own efiling manager, with its own formats, quirks, and failure modes. Rhetoric sits between your product and that landscape, so you can file a document with one API call instead of learning a new integration for every jurisdiction you support. We are facing that complexity head on, so that the next person does not have to.
Mustafa is a software engineer with experience spanning a range of companies, from big tech to nimble startups. He is also a recovering lawyer.