How BenchRecon briefs are built.
1. What we make
BenchRecon produces brief-form PDF exhibits in two families. For state and county practice: officer-record reports — Florida FDLE/CJSTC certification discipline plus use-of-force incident rows, Chicago CPD complaint records, Texas TCOLE, NYC CCRB complaint history, Georgia POST, Arizona AZPOST, and California POST/CDCR certification records for the officers testifying against your client — and the Jury Instruction Brief, which reproduces the verbatim Florida Standard Jury Instruction text for your charge with its adoption and amendment history. For federal practice: structured comparables reports drawn from public federal sentencing data, each scoped to a specific offense-level / criminal-history-category cell, surfacing the cases the government's standard tool (JSIN) does not show: sentences the Commission collected but excludes from its published statistics.
The output is a litigation exhibit, not legal advice. It documents what the public record shows. How that record is used in plea or sentencing argument is counsel's work, not ours.
Every claim in every brief that can be tied to a specific source carries a data-source citation. The brief's footer reports the total count. If a number appears without a citation, it is labeled as estimated or approximate — never as sourced.
2. Where the data comes from
Active product data sources. Sentencing Snapshot and JSIN Exclusion Brief — the products built on the USSC individual-case datafile — draw exclusively from the U.S. Sentencing Commission's public individual-case datafiles. The Commission publishes annual datafiles covering every federal case sentenced under the Guidelines since FY 1987. The individual-case microdata includes offense level, criminal history category, final sentence, district, judge, and departure/variance notation. ussc.gov/research/datafiles. The Commission anonymizes case-level microdata by design — there is no per-case docket URL on ussc.gov; the verifiable source is the datafile itself.
State-court product data sources. Officer Lookup — free search plus a purchasable full report — draws on Florida FDLE/CJSTC certification-discipline exports plus Florida use-of-force incident rows, Chicago CPD complaint records, Texas TCOLE, Georgia POST, Arizona AZPOST, and California POST/CDCR peace-officer certification and employment history (obtained under each state's public-records act and published via the National Police Index — certification history, not internal-affairs complaint files), NYC CCRB civilian-complaint history (NYC Open Data, post-§50-a-repeal), and a national source-backed incident ledger (source-cited leads for attorney review, not Brady/Giglio conclusions), with every rendered row citing the underlying public record. The Jury Instruction Brief draws on the Florida Standard Jury Instruction texts with their adoption and amendment history; every instruction line links to the source authority behind it, and thin coverage is flagged, not filled in. The waitlisted products (District Recon, Judge Snapshot) will draw on additional public datasets — CourtListener (free.law), RECAP (free.law/recap), and FJC IDB (fjc.gov/research/idb). Wherever a brief cites an external source such as a court opinion, the citation links to that source directly; no paywalled citations are used.
3. The data-source citation convention
In the federal sentencing briefs, every factual claim that derives from a specific record is labeled with the USSC datafile vintage from which it was drawn — for example, "USSC Individual-Case Datafile for the relevant fiscal year." That vintage is publicly downloadable from ussc.gov, so any figure in the brief can be reproduced by downloading the same file and running the same cell filter. The Commission anonymizes case-level microdata by design, so verification is at the datafile level — not per-docket. The state-court products apply the same convention against their own sources: every officer-record row cites the public record it came from, and every instruction line links to the source authority behind it. External sources (statutes, opinions, secondary literature) are linked directly when cited. No paywalled citations are used.
The brief's footer reports a source-citation count. That number tells you how many claims in the brief are anchored to a checkable source. Our minimum threshold is one citation per substantive factual claim.
This convention exists because of Mata v. Avianca (S.D.N.Y. 2023) and the professional-responsibility consequences it put into permanent record — 1,227 documented hallucination incidents in 2026, with a record sanction of $109,700. BenchRecon ships zero generative content; every claim is an aggregated public record. If any data-source citation in our brief is broken or does not resolve to its cited public record, email us within 7 days and we will correct the brief or refund the purchase.
4. What we do not do
We do not generate argument text. We do not use large language models to synthesize legal analysis. The brief artifact is a structured data exhibit — numbers, distributions, and source citations, formatted for courtroom use. The JSIN Exclusion Brief includes a § 3006A factual-recital block: a fixed template with cell-specific values substituted in (not LLM-generated), labeled "edit before filing" in the brief itself. Counsel reviews and edits before any use.
We do not provide legal advice. Nothing in a BenchRecon brief constitutes legal advice, legal strategy, or legal representation. The brief is a research exhibit. Your judgment as counsel governs how — and whether — it enters the record.
We do not claim that any sentencing outcome in the data is binding, recommended, or appropriate for your client's case. The data is what the Commission collected. What it means for your client is a legal question, not a data question.
5. Refresh cadence
USSC annual datafiles are released each fall, typically covering the fiscal year ending September 30. We update our working dataset within 30 days of each annual release. The brief you purchase reflects the most recent available USSC datafile at the time of generation, which is identified in the brief header.
Codebook: FY99-FY25-codebook-MAND1-MAND2 · Floor: FY2013 · Row count: ~656,000New brief renders are routed to refund-pending while the refresh cron catches up. No customer is charged for a brief built on data older than 30 days.
CourtListener / RECAP / FJC IDB refresh cadences will be documented when those sources enter active products.
6. UPL disclaimer
BenchRecon does not provide legal advice, legal representation, or legal services. The information presented in every brief is public-records aggregation drawn from cited public records — the USSC public datafile, public officer-conduct records, and court-published standard instruction texts. Nothing in any BenchRecon product constitutes an attorney-client relationship or a legal opinion. Your judgment as licensed counsel governs how this research is used, whether it is disclosed, and whether it is appropriate for your client's case. State UPL rules apply to any downstream use of this material.