About LexGrade
An open scoring standard grounded in real motion practice.
LexGrade is an open standard for scoring the quality of legal drafting. Its criteria come from active litigation in the New York State and federal courts, from trial-level motion practice through appeal in both systems. The criteria came from filing motions and reading what courts actually did with them, and from noticing over time what separates a motion a court can act on from one it cannot. They grew out of that experience rather than a style guide.
One lesson sits at the center: a filing's job is to compel action. A well-built motion often does, sometimes even when the specific relief is denied.
The calibration targets New York State Supreme Court motion practice, the venue the Standard was first built and verified against. The framework is built to extend to other courts and jurisdictions as it gets tested against them.
Who it's for
The people who most need a well-built motion are usually the least able to pay for one. Competent motion practice costs hours of a lawyer's time, which prices out most self-represented litigants, and they are now the majority of parties in many family and housing courts. LexGrade was built for that gap. It does not promise to win cases. What it offers is a written, checkable account of the difference between a motion a court can act on and one it cannot, and paired with a language model, that check becomes reproducible at almost no marginal cost.
That is the point of opening it. A scoring standard a litigant can run against their own draft, and a technique register that names what experienced advocates do by instinct, turn knowledge that used to require a retainer into something a self-represented party can apply directly. The value is access: narrowing the gap between the drafting a court expects and the drafting most litigants can afford.
What it builds on
LexGrade did not appear from nothing. Its rubric method of weighted components, capped point values, and narrative performance bands builds on prior legal-writing assessment scholarship, and its calibration is measured against New York's governing rules. The sources are credited in full on the references page.
Validation status, stated plainly. The Standard is a single-author instrument: its criteria and weights have not yet been validated by independent graders, and it does not claim otherwise. The next milestone is an inter-rater reliability round — independent, bar-admitted graders scoring shared exemplars blind, with agreement measured by Krippendorff's α — and the calibration materials return to this site when that round is real. Until then, the honest claim is the smaller one: the criteria are published, stable, and citable, and every legal citation in the Standard itself has been verified against the official sources.
What this is and isn't
LexGrade is an open, independently maintained model of effective motion practice, published so others can use it, test it, and improve it. It is not promulgated by any court, bar, or government body, it confers no authority, and nothing here is legal advice. Every legal citation, whether in the Standard itself or in any motion drafted or assessed with it, must be independently verified before filing.
The methodology is governed in the open and licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0, free to reuse and adapt with attribution. It belongs to its field rather than to any vendor, bar, or individual, and it improves by being argued over. The Standard and the Technique Register carry the substance. This page is only the background.