Start with data and you’ll learn how a judge rules. Start with a biography and you’ll know where to look next.
In part one, we looked at how a judge’s background shapes the research questions worth asking. In this article, we’ll show what it looks like when you actually run those queries, read the results, and turn a biography into a research strategy.
The Trellis Connector brings Trellis’ state trial court database directly into Claude. What follows is a walk-through of three research prompts, all grounded in a single judge biography — and what each one revealed.
The judge biography
The Hon. Daniel S. Murphy is a judge on the Los Angeles County Superior Court in California. He was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005. According to his Trellis biography, he spent years in government service after law school, including roles as a deputy city prosecutor and deputy city attorney for the City of Long Beach.
Murphy’s background raised several practical questions. Would he hold parties to a stricter evidentiary standard? Would he approach dispositive motions differently? Would his government experience shape how he evaluates immunity defenses and procedural compliance?
Those became the starting points for the research.
First line of inquiry: pleading-stage scrutiny
Sample Prompt 1
Using Trellis, pull judicial analytics for the Hon. Daniel S. Murphy of the Los Angeles County Superior Court. I am looking for data on demurrers and motions for leave to amend. Compare each against the county average, and note the plaintiff/defendant split.
Murphy sustains demurrers at a rate of 59.6 percent, nearly eight points above the county average, with little difference between plaintiffs and defendants. The numbers point to a courtroom focused more on pleading quality than party preference.
The motions for leave to amend data is even more striking. Murphy grants leave to amend 41 points below the county average. The plaintiff split is especially notable: plaintiffs receive leave to amend only 10 percent of the time.
Together, the numbers suggest that Murphy treats the pleading stage as a critical point in litigation. Plaintiffs may have limited opportunities to correct deficiencies once challenged. That makes early factual development and pleading precision especially important in his courtroom.
For defendants, demurrers may present a meaningful opportunity to narrow or dismiss claims early, particularly given Murphy’s reluctance to allow amendments.
Second line of inquiry: evidentiary rigor
Sample Prompt 2
My judge is the Hon. Daniel S. Murphy of the Los Angeles County Superior Court. Before taking the bench, he spent 17 years as a city prosecutor and city attorney in Long Beach. That background makes me wonder how he might handle dispositive motions as a judge. Using Trellis, pull a sample of his motion for summary judgment rulings. Review the text of these rulings. What do they reveal about how he approaches the record as a decision-maker? Identify the four most consistent patterns and tie each pattern to a practical litigation strategy.
Together, these patterns reveal a judge shaped by years of statutory practice. Murphy expects briefs to be built the way statutes are read: element by element, theory by theory, with evidence that closes each gap. Lawyers who match that precision tend to fare well; those who rely on narrative momentum or inferential leaps tend to find their arguments dissected and discarded.
Third line of inquiry: institutional familiarity
Sample Prompt 3a
My judge is the Hon. Daniel S. Murphy of the Los Angeles County Superior Court. Using Trellis, pull cases across the county that have a city or a municipality as a party. I want to know if there are any patterns in how he evaluates these types of claims.
According to the cases cited across these three patterns, government actors tend to win in Murphy’s courtroom. Cases go in, and cities, counties, and public officials often come out ahead. From a distance, that can look like a judicial disposition—an instinctive alignment with institutional defendants.
But the closer read points somewhere else. Much of what initially looks like pro-government favoritism turns out to be doctrine doing the work. And that insight leads to a more important question: why does he apply those doctrines the way he does?
Murphy appears particularly deferential to administrative processes and reluctant to expand public entity liability beyond clearly established boundaries. The rulings suggest a judge who views courts primarily as reviewers of institutional decision-making rather than substitutes for it.
Sample Prompt 3b
How are these stances different from his judicial colleagues in Los Angeles? Maybe all of the judges rule this way. Use Trellis to support your answer.
The skepticism in prompt 3b is warranted.
Two of the three patterns are largely shared across all courtrooms in Los Angeles County. They reflect California law, not Murphy’s individual judicial temperament. Exhaustion is a hard procedural rule, and deference to administrative agencies under §1094.5 is the norm. A litigant challenging government action would face much the same baseline before Chalfant, Kin, or most other judges. Your energy would be better spent on the merits of those issues than on the judicial assignment.
However, the place where judge assignment genuinely changes your litigation calculus is in constitutional tort cases. If you have a qualified immunity claim against a municipality or its officers, Murphy will be a harder draw than most of his colleagues on the same court. That’s a venue and assignment consideration worth raising early, before the case is assigned or while transfer remains an option.
Concluding thoughts
Judge research typically starts and ends with a grant rate. What this exercise shows is that the number is only as useful as the question that generated it. Murphy’s 37.4 percent MSJ grant rate tells you something. His prosecutorial background tells you what to do with it — and more importantly, what else to pull.
The biography didn’t just add context. It drove the research design. It told you to look at demurrers, to scrutinize how he handles evidentiary sufficiency, and to test his rulings in government party cases — because a prosecutor’s background raises specific questions about record completeness, factual rigor, and institutional familiarity that a grant rate alone would never surface.
That last check — the peer comparison — is what separated genuine insight from confirmation bias. Not every pattern is Murphy-specific. Some of it is just doctrine doing what doctrine does. Knowing the difference is the point.
The Trellis Claude Connector handles the data retrieval. The biography tells you where to point it.
FAQ
Trellis is the most comprehensive tool for researching state trial court judges. It provides motion-level analytics, case timelines, and outcome data for individual judges across 45 states — including grant and denial rates by motion type, plaintiff versus defendant splits, and comparisons against county averages. The Trellis Connector for Claude lets attorneys run those queries in plain language directly through Claude.
The most reliable way is to pull the judge’s motion outcome data and compare it against peers in the same jurisdiction. Trellis provides judge-level analytics drawn from state trial court records across 45 states — showing how a specific judge rules on motions like demurrers, summary judgment, and motions in limine, and where they diverge from county averages. You can access this through the Trellis platform at trellis.law or through the Trellis Connector for Claude.
Most attorneys start with the judge’s biography — employment history, educational background, and professional affiliations — to identify the lines of inquiry worth testing. Then they pull motion outcome data, case timelines, and written rulings to see how those hypotheses hold up against the actual record. Trellis brings all of that together in one place, with judge-level analytics drawn from the largest collection of state trial court data available. The Trellis Connector for Claude lets you run that research through conversational queries directly in Claude.
Through Trellis, attorneys can access motion grant and denial rates by motion type, case timelines, plaintiff versus defendant splits, written rulings, and peer comparisons against other judges in the same jurisdiction — all drawn from state trial court records across 45 states. Trellis is the largest legal research platform for state trial courts and the only tool that structures this data at the judge level with the depth and coverage needed to make those insights reliable.
Trellis aggregates motion-level data for individual judges from state trial court records across 45 states. You can pull a judge’s full motion history — including how they rule on specific motion types, how their outcomes compare to county averages, and how the splits break down between plaintiffs and defendants — through the Trellis platform at trellis.law or through the Trellis Connector for Claude.
Motion-level analytics from Trellis show how a judge rules across specific motion types broken down by plaintiff versus defendant. It’s worth noting that the split isn’t always what it appears — as the example in this article illustrates, what looks like party preference can turn out to be a consistent pleading or evidentiary standard applied equally to both sides. Trellis gives you the data to tell the difference.
Trellis provides summary judgment grant rates and other motion-level analytics for individual judges across 45 states, including comparisons against county averages and plaintiff versus defendant breakdowns. You can access this data at trellis.law or by querying the judge by name and court through the Trellis Connector for Claude.
The Trellis Connector for Claude connects Trellis’s state trial court database directly to Claude, allowing attorneys to research judges through plain language queries — pulling motion grant rates, case timelines, written rulings, and peer comparisons without switching between platforms. The prompts in this article are a working example of what that research workflow looks like in practice.
Yes — through the Trellis Connector for Claude. Once connected, Claude can query Trellis’s state trial court database directly, giving attorneys access to judge analytics, motion outcome data, case timelines, and written rulings across 45 states through conversational prompts. To set it up, navigate to Customize, then Connectors in Claude, search for Trellis, and hit Connect.
In Claude, navigate to Customize, then Connectors. Search for Trellis and hit Connect. Once connected, you can query Trellis’s state trial court data directly through Claude in plain language — pulling judge analytics, motion outcome data, and case timelines without leaving your research workflow.
Westlaw focuses primarily on appellate opinions and published decisions. Trellis is purpose-built for state trial court research — where most litigation strategy is actually executed. It provides motion-level analytics, case timeline data, and judge-specific outcome patterns drawn from trial court dockets across 45 states, the kind of practical intelligence that appellate-focused platforms don’t offer. For attorneys who need to understand how a judge actually behaves in the courtroom — not just what the law says — Trellis fills a gap that Westlaw doesn’t address.
Neither Westlaw nor LexisNexis offers structured judge analytics at the state trial court level. Their coverage focuses primarily on appellate opinions and published decisions. Trellis is purpose-built for this gap — aggregating motion outcome data, case timelines, and judge-level analytics from state trial court records across 45 states, structured in a way that makes it actionable for litigation strategy before you walk into the courtroom.