JUDICIAL COUNCIL OF RIDGEWAY
The 2025–2026 court activity discontinuity: a record-based analysis
A claim has circulated that the Ridgeway courts declined because the court moved onto a website. This analysis tests that claim against the court's own case-management record. The record places the loss of activity at the closure of the Ridgemade platform in December 2025, an event that occurred outside the court and was not produced by any court web service. Activity returned once the court was reconstituted on its current platform in February 2026. The website the claim blames did not serve a single recorded request until after the decline it is said to have caused.
Compiled July 9, 2026 from 399 cases and 873 filings. Every figure below is read from the live database when this page loads; the method is set out at the end. This document is a technical analysis by the court's web services team. It is not a judicial opinion and decides no matter before the court.
The claim under examination
The claim is short: that moving to a website killed the legal community. It is usually made without dates and without figures, which is the first reason to doubt it. Activity in a court is recorded. A real cause leaves a mark in the record at the time it operated, so the question has a factual answer. The rest of this document finds the point at which activity was actually lost and sets it beside the timeline of the court's web services.
Three periods in the record
The court's recorded history since June 2025 falls into three periods.
The Ridgemade period (June to November 2025). The court opened on its first web platform when Ridgeway moved onto the Ridgemade project. Activity rose quickly over the summer and fell through the autumn.
The shutdown (Dec 2025 and Jan 2026). Ridgemade went offline. For the whole of these two months the court record holds no cases, no filings, no orders, and no new members. This was a closure of the host platform. It was not a court decision, and no court web service produced it.
The reconstitution (February 2026 to the present). The court was rebuilt on the platform this team now operates. Activity resumed and has since passed the Ridgemade period in caseload and in filing volume.
Figure 1. Monthly filings and new cases, June 2025 to present
Filings (tall bar) and new cases (narrow bar) by month. The two empty columns are the Ridgemade shutdown.
Where the activity was lost
Three measurements, each taken from Figure 1 and the underlying tables.
The loss sits inside the platform closure.
The last case of the Ridgemade period was filed on November 15, 2025. The next was filed on February 22, 2026. The whole interval is the Ridgemade shutdown, and Dec 2025 and Jan 2026 record no activity of any kind. The discontinuity is located at the closure of the host platform, in time and in cause.
The current website post-dates the decline.
The platform this team operates began logging traffic on February 25, 2026 and has handled 404,060 requests since. It served nothing before that date. A system whose first recorded request falls in February 2026 cannot have caused a decline that reached zero in December 2025. The website named as the cause did not yet exist as a running service.
On the reassignment of blame
Set against the record, the website claim is wrong about timing and wrong about cause. It also does something more specific. It relocates responsibility for a platform's closure, and for the leadership departures that came with it, onto the infrastructure that replaced them. That substitution serves a function. It turns attention away from why the platform closed and from who left when it did, and toward a system that did not yet exist. Whoever finds the substitution convenient, the record does not allow it: the loss is fixed in time to the closure, weeks before the current platform served a single request.
The reasoning is the post hoc fallacy applied to a political end. One event followed another in time, so the later is named the cause of the earlier, which the calendar forbids, and the people best served by the confusion are the ones repeating it. This team takes no position on any individual and accuses no one of anything. It corrects the record, because a record that can be rewritten by whoever is loudest stops being a record. Where this narrative is advanced to affect the standing or the conduct of matters before the court, it should be read against the court's own data, which is set out above.
The one deficiency the record does show
The record contains one real shortcoming, and this team will not minimize it. Expungements were harder to file than they should have been. They account for 20.6% of all cases (82 of 399), and they did not recover with the rest of the docket after reconstitution, averaging about 10.0 per month while total filings reached their highest levels.
The Web Services Team found this access gap and closed it on its own initiative, by building and deploying the Expungement Portal now in service. That is the correct treatment for an access problem: locate it, then repair it. It is not support for the wider claim. An intake defect in one category, eleven percent of the docket, is a maintenance task. It did not cause the community's decline; an intake defect in one category cannot account for a court-wide gap that reached zero before this team's platform existed.
Conclusion
The court record does not support the claim that a website ended the legal community. The loss of activity coincides with the closure of the Ridgemade platform, an event outside the court, and with the departure of much of the original membership at that closure. The court's current web service began operating after the decline, and it is the system under which activity returned. The single genuine defect in the record, expungement access, has been corrected by this team. Readers are asked to check every figure here against the database; the method follows.
Ridgeway Court Web Services Team
Method and sources
Every figure on this page is computed when the page loads by aggregating the live court database: the User, Case, Filing, Order, CaseParty, Document, Judge and ApiAccessLog tables. No value is hand-entered, and the page re-derives them on every load.
The boundary between the Ridgemade period and the reconstitution is taken from the data, as the first day of the month in which the current platform's request log begins. The first logged request is February 25, 2026; the boundary snaps to the start of that month, so it precedes the first logged request by a few weeks. Continuity counts a person as returning if the same account filed both before and after the shutdown.
Ridgemade period: June 15, 2025 to November 15, 2025. Reconstitution: from February 1, 2026. Compiled July 9, 2026.