About this tool

An independent, public finding aid for recent Michigan appellate decisions. It helps you locate documents; it does not write summaries, answer legal questions, or generate any text. It is not a product of, affiliated with, or endorsed by the Michigan courts, and nothing here is legal advice.

What is in the collection

Every document was retrieved from the Michigan Courts’ own case-search API at courts.michigan.gov on August 25, 2026, and every record links back to its official PDF. About 250 documents (almost all one-page orders) were scanned images or had unreadable text layers and were converted with optical character recognition; those pages are flagged.

How the documents are described

Each PDF was converted to text and read for the fields you can filter on: court, document type, publication status, decision date, docket and lower-court numbers, the parties in the caption, the trial court and county, the panel and authoring judge, the disposition (affirmed, reversed, remanded, leave denied…), and the statutes (MCL) and court rules (MCR) cited. Nothing is guessed by a model — every value comes from a pattern on the page or from the court’s own index.

Area of law is decoded from the two-letter case-type code the State Court Administrative Office assigns to every lower-court case number (for example 22-107852-CZ is a general civil case; 2023-001994-NA is a child protective case; FC and FH are felony prosecutions). Where a document has no lower-court number, the area is inferred from the caption (People v — criminal; In re … Minor — child welfare).

How search works

Three ways of finding a case run at once, and the results are merged:

• By number. A six-digit appellate docket, or a lower-court number like 22-107852-CZ, goes straight to an exact lookup — that document leads the results.
• By name. Party names are matched against the case caption, so searching a party returns that case rather than every case that happens to mention the name.
• By description. This is the one most people need. Describe what you remember about a case — the facts, the issue, a half-remembered phrase — and the system matches on meaning, not just matching words. “A dog bit a guest and the court ordered it euthanized” finds the case even though the opinion says “dangerous animal” and “euthanize” and never uses your phrasing.

The description search combines two signals. Every passage of every document is stored as a vector — a numeric representation of its meaning, produced by an embedding model (Qwen3-Embedding-4B) — and your description is turned into a vector the same way; passages whose vectors sit closest to yours are candidates. In parallel, a conventional full-text index finds passages containing your distinctive terms. The two candidate lists are fused, and a cross-encoder (Jina) re-reads the top candidates against your description and reorders them. All filters are applied inside the database query, so counts and results always agree.

Reading the results responsibly

• Unpublished Court of Appeals opinions are not binding precedent (MCR 7.215(C)(1)). Published opinions are.
• An order denying leave to appeal decides nothing about the merits.
• Opinions marked “for publication” remain subject to revision until they appear in the Michigan Appeals Reports.
• The generated answer can misread a passage. The citations are there so you can check; please do.

Privacy and logging

Searches and questions are logged (without account information; IP addresses are hashed) to evaluate and improve retrieval quality. Reported problems with answers are stored alongside the answer they concern.

Contact

Built by Brian E. Perron, PhD, University of Michigan School of Social Work, as a companion to the Michigan Court Rules search. Found an error? Email beperron@umich.edu.