An empty appellate courtroom with a dark walnut bench in soft morning light

For New York and federal practitioners

Court-ready work, built on your own computer.

Bench Copy assembles appellate briefs to each court's rules and turns them into the filing package the court's portal will accept. Bench Copy Discovery organizes a criminal production by date, subject, and Bates range. Both run locally. Your clients' files never touch our servers.

New in Bench Copy 2.7 and Discovery: Analyze / Isolate and Analyze / Summarize — the first pass through the record and the discovery, graded and cited
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Mac and Windows. No credit card for the trial. Cancel anytime from your account.

Matter data stays localPer-matter files on your disk. Only billing and activation are hosted.
Format, check, and packageCourt-profile formatting, then a PDF/A filing package validated against the portal's own rules.
Works offlineOpen a matter in a courthouse with no signal. Thirty-day offline grace on every plan.
Never locked outIf a subscription lapses, your matters stay readable and exportable.

Two products, one desktop

Choose the tool for the stage of the case.

Each is licensed separately and installs on Mac or Windows. Firms often run both: Discovery for the trial team, Appellate Brief Builder for the appeal.

Bench Copy™Appellate Brief Builder

Court profiles drive the brief: structure, mechanical statements, table of authorities, record and appendix build, and DOCX, PDF, and WordPerfect-compatible export. You write the argument; the app keeps it compliant.

  • Appellate Divisions (1st–4th), Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, U.S. Supreme Court
  • CPL 440 motions, CPLR Article 78, and §§ 2254/2255 habeas with prefilled AO forms
  • Import or paste existing Word and WordPerfect briefs with formatting intact
  • Analyze / Isolate: every objection, motion, and colloquy in the transcripts, graded for preservation with page and line
  • Transcript fact cards tied to record pages; point-by-point editors with compliance checks
  • File with the court: validated PDF/A filing packages, per-court portal checklists, and a filing log

Solo $79/mo  ·  Firm $59/seat

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Bench Copy™Discovery

Bring in a production from a folder, Drive, or OneDrive link. The app stages every file for your review, reads Bates ranges and dates, runs OCR locally, and builds a searchable, chronological index linked to people, charges, and motions.

  • Analyze / Summarize: twenty-one rules propose item-cited findings into the case summary; re-run after each production
  • CPL 245 and Rule 16 disclosure tracking, inventory reconciliation, gap reports
  • Omnibus, post-verdict, and federal motion scaffolds with an exhibit index by discovery ID
  • Source-linked New York state and federal court and prosecutor directory
  • Protective-order-aware client packets; encrypted exports for correctional tablets

Solo $99/mo  ·  Assigned Counsel $49/mo

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Analyze

The first pass through the record and the discovery, done the way counsel does it.

Both apps now read what they hold and lay out what a careful first read would find: every objection and ruling in a trial transcript, graded for preservation; every element, witness, gap, and date conflict in a production, proposed as a finding. Each result carries its page and line or item ID, so you check the source before you rely on it.

  • Rules, not a cloud modelPattern matching on the reporter's text and the matter's own records, on your computer, offline
  • Nothing moves without youNothing reaches the brief or the summary until you press Accept
  • Triage, not a legal opinionA first pass with the authority named beside it. Read the page before you cite it

Bench Copy™ · Appellate Brief Builder

Analyze / Isolate

Reads every transcript in the matter and lists the events that may carry an issue: objections and the court's rulings with the stated ground, trial-order-of-dismissal and Rule 29 motions and whether they were renewed, suppression, Sandoval, Molineux, Batson, and severance colloquy, requests to charge, jury notes and read-backs, CPL 330.30 motions, and sentencing. Each card shows the printed page and reporter line, the phase, the witness, the speaker, the ground, the ruling, and a preservation grade under the court's rules.

  • Isolate copies the pages that carry an accepted event from the original PDF into a short highlighted excerpt. Nothing is regenerated from OCR text.
  • Add as Point opens a Point in the brief with a Preservation paragraph that quotes the colloquy and its cite: (T. 212, lines 4–9) in New York form, (Tr. 212:4-9) in federal.
  • Preservation memo writes a Word memorandum of every card you have not rejected, grouped by grade.

Bench Copy Discovery™

Analyze / Summarize

Twenty-one rules in six families (elements of the charges, people, gaps, dates, disclosure posture, coverage) read the matter's index, people, indictment, CPL 245 grid or federal checklist, inventory checks, and text index, and propose findings into the case summary: an element with nothing linked to it, a witness with no statement, material listed but not produced, a date that conflicts between productions. Each finding names its rule and the items it cites by ID. Edit the wording, accept it into a Summary chapter, or reject it.

  • After each production, run again. The page shows only what changed: new proposals, accepted points whose support changed, and points whose basis has gone away.
  • What the discovery shows writes a plain overview chapter; Ask the discovery answers six structured questions with item-cited rows.
  • Exports: Word report under a work-product header, CSV of every finding, and a "What changed by production" change sheet. Analysis never enters a client tablet packet.

No scanner finds everything. Court reporters differ, sidebars are often off the record, OCR drops words, and the rules can only read what has been indexed, linked, and dated. Treat each list as a first pass, and read the transcript and the discovery.

File with the court

The brief you finish in Bench Copy leaves as the package the court will accept.

Every other brief tool stops at the export button and leaves you to guess at the portal's rules. Bench Copy's File with the court tab builds the filing package, checks it against each court's e-filing requirements with the rule cited beside every check, walks you screen by screen through the court's own portal, and keeps the confirmation and stamped copy with the matter.

  • Portal-specificNYSCEF, Court-PASS, the Second Circuit's ACMS, district CM/ECF, and the U.S. Supreme Court, each with its own naming, size, and PDF/A rules
  • Every check cited22 NYCRR 1245 and 500.2, ACMS portal instructions, Sup. Ct. R. 29, 22 NYCRR 202.5-b
  • On recordFiling log with the court's confirmation or NYSCEF document number and the stamped copy
  1. 1

    Build the filing package

    The latest brief export and record or appendix volumes become PDF/A-2b copies named the way the court asks, with a SHA-256 manifest and a checklist, in one package folder.

  2. 2

    Validate against the portal's rules

    Encryption, text layer, the 100 MB cap with automatic splitting, bookmarks, page labels, comments and markup, embedded fonts, page size, and scan resolution, each with the portal rule it comes from.

  3. 3

    Hand off to the court's portal

    A per-court card shows who may file, upload limits, and sign-in and registration links that open in your own browser, beside a screen-by-screen checklist you tick off as you go. You sign in and press Submit.

  4. 4

    Log the filing

    Status, the court's confirmation or NYSCEF document number, filed-on and filed-by, notes, and the stamped copy stay with the package. Hard-copy duties after e-filing are listed per department.

Bench Copy never holds court credentials, never logs in, and never clicks Submit. No New York or federal court it supports offers a filing API to third-party software, and automating a court login would put your registration at risk, so the final step stays with the attorney. Where state systems certify third-party filing software, in-app submission is on the roadmap.

Why local-first

A subscription to software, not a place to put your clients' files.

Most legal SaaS asks you to upload discovery or draft briefs into someone else's cloud. Bench Copy takes the opposite position. The apps run entirely on your Mac or PC; the only things we host are your account, your invoice, and a license check.

01

Per-matter databases on your disk

Each matter is its own encrypted SQLite file. Back it up, move it, or hand it to successor counsel. JSON import and export are built in.

02

Nothing to subpoena from us

We cannot produce what we never hold. Billing records are the only client-adjacent data on our side, and they contain no matter content.

03

OCR, search, and exports run offline

Bundled Tesseract reads scanned PDFs locally. Search covers text-layer PDFs, saved OCR, Word files, and notes. Exports are files, not links.

04

Read-only, never locked

If a card fails or a firm changes tools, every matter opens in read-only mode with full export. That is the ethical standard, and it is in the Terms.

Pricing

Flat prices. Unlimited matters. No per-gigabyte fees.

Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. Annual billing is ten months for the price of twelve.

Appellate Brief Builder Bench Copy™

Solo

One attorney or paralegal, unlimited matters

$79 / month

or $790 billed annually

  • All court profiles and proceedings
  • DOCX, PDF, RTF, and .doc export
  • File with the court: packages, checklists, log
  • Two device activations
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Firm

Three-seat minimum, shared matters on your own drive

$59 / seat / month

or $590 per seat annually

  • Everything in Solo
  • Admin seat management, one invoice
  • Firm-wide typeface and caption presets
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Discovery Bench Copy™

Assigned Counsel

18-B, CJA panel, and other assigned counsel, verified by panel letter

$49 / month

or $490 billed annually

  • Full Discovery feature set
  • Single user, non-transferable
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Solo

One attorney or paralegal, unlimited matters

$99 / month

or $990 billed annually

  • Drive and OneDrive intake, local OCR and search
  • Motions module and court directory
  • Client packets and tablet exports
Start free trial

Firm

Private defense firms, three-seat minimum

$79 / seat / month

or $790 per seat annually

  • Everything in Solo
  • Shared matters through your firm's Drive or OneDrive
  • Admin seat management, one invoice
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Defender Office

Public defender and legal aid offices

From $15,000 / year

Up to 25 attorneys · 26–100 attorneys $40,000 · larger offices quoted

  • Office-wide license, purchase order and invoice
  • Onboarding and training for staff
  • Volume deployment via Apple Business Manager or MSIX
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Bundle Both products

Appellate Brief Builder + Discovery

For solos handling the trial and the appeal

$149 / month

or $1,490 billed annually — about $29 a month off the two Solo plans

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Matter Build service

We build the organizer from your raw production

Quoted per production

Flat fee. Delivered as a Discovery matter file you own. Available on any plan.

Ask about a Matter Build

Prices in U.S. dollars. Sales tax applied where required. Trials convert to the selected plan unless cancelled; cancel from your account at any time.

Assigned Counsel pricing requires a current panel appointment letter; we verify once a year.

Coverage today

New York and federal first. Other states as we expand.

Appellate Brief Builder — formatting profiles

App. Div., First Dept.App. Div., Second Dept.App. Div., Third Dept.App. Div., Fourth Dept.N.Y. Court of AppealsU.S. Court of Appeals, 2d Cir.U.S. Supreme Court (cert.)CPL 440CPLR Art. 78§ 2254 / § 2255 — N.D., S.D., E.D., W.D.N.Y.

Discovery — disclosure regimes and directories

N.Y. CPL Article 245Fed. R. Crim. P. 16Brady / Giglio trackingN.Y. state courts directoryN.Y. federal districts directoryDistrict Attorneys and U.S. AttorneysOmnibus and post-verdict motionsCorrectional-tablet packets

Get started

Seven days free. Install today, file this week.

Create an account with your email. We send a sign-in link, you download the app, and the trial starts when you open your first matter.

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