What Is the Motions & Issues Directory?

Legal primers and treatises

Trellis’ Motions & Issues directory contains free legal treatises and primers on the most common civil motion types and legal issues, organized by state. Every treatise is thoroughly researched and authored by our team of experienced attorneys. Much like our other core features such as Smart Search and Judge Analytics / Judge Biographies, our treatises are designed to save you time when you’re researching for and drafting pleadings and motions at the state trial court level.

🔎 For example, each treatise provides a basic overview of common legal thresholds, timing requirements, and other crucial legal authorities to review when litigating a particular legal issue or bringing a common motion type in state court. Wherever you see yellow highlights in a legal treatise, we’ve done the work of emphasizing commonly cited authorities, threshold requirements, and legal exceptions that you shouldn’t miss.

Moreover, unlike other secondary sources, our Motion & Issues directory maps every treatise to real world examples of motions, pleadings, and court rulings, allowing you to immediately access and analyze how other attorneys and judges have applied the legal authorities you’ve just read.

Simply scroll to the bottom of a treatise to find a running list of relevant court filings updated on a daily basis. The Trellis Database aggregates filed Documents and case Dockets from state trial courts all over the country and makes them searchable from a single interface (Smart Search). By linking our database to each treatise, our goal is to provide attorneys with an invaluable shortcut in their research and writing process.

💡 We strongly recommend that after reading a treatise and analyzing its list of relevant court filings to get a basic understanding of the law, you then use Smart Search to conduct further research that’s tailored to your case. Indeed, on Smart Search, you may search the legal authorities you find in our treatises along with keywords relevant to your case to research how your judge, opposing counsel, and other parties / corporations have applied the law in successful motions and pleadings for cases that have similar fact patterns to your own.