J-Law 53 — Incremental Litigation; the "Is This Sufficient?" Check-In

There shall be an incremental litigation process. A litigant may check in with the judge to ask whether a filing is sufficient before investing further, rather than always being forced to produce an exhaustive submission when a fraction of the effort would suffice.

Litigation forces a brutal gamble on every filing. The litigant cannot know whether two hours of drafting will suffice or whether thirty are needed, and the penalty for guessing low is losing — so fear drives everyone to the maximum. Briefs swell, exhibits multiply, and thousands of hours of defensive over-preparation are burned on submissions where a tenth of the effort would have prevailed. Attorneys bill this waste to clients; the self-represented pay it out of their own lives.

Every other demanding domain solved this long ago with iteration. Engineers review designs in stages, editors read drafts, regulators offer pre-submission conferences precisely so applicants stop guessing at sufficiency. A simple check-in — is this enough, or does the court need more? — costs the judge minutes and saves the parties weeks. Courts complain constantly about bloated filings while enforcing the exact incentive structure that produces them.

The expected counterargument: sufficiency check-ins amount to advisory opinions, with judges pre-approving filings and effectively coaching one side. Precision about what is asked dissolves the concern. The check-in addresses procedural adequacy — whether a filing contains what the court needs to decide — and never guarantees a merits outcome, a distinction courts already administer through pre-motion conferences, required meet-and-confers, and the pre-submission processes federal judges increasingly use. Coaching objections assume the check-in is exclusive, and nothing makes it so; both sides hold the same right, which converts the "advantage" into a shared efficiency. The status quo deserves its own description in this comparison: a system that extracts maximum labor from every participant by keeping the sufficiency threshold secret, then blames the participants for the length of their filings. Secrecy about what is enough serves no one except those paid by the hour to overshoot it.