A pro se litigant gets a court order. They don't understand it. They miss a deadline. That's a recoverable mistake when a lawyer is involved — and an unrecoverable one when there isn't one.
PlainOrder is the 2 AM bridge. Paste any court order, ruling, or notice and it returns:
• A plain-English explanation at an 8th-grade reading level • A numbered list of action items — what you actually need to do • A list of every deadline, downloadable as a calendar (.ics) file you can import into Google Calendar or Apple Calendar
Free. No login. No documents stored on our end. Works in any modern browser.
Built for people who don't have a lawyer — but also useful for paralegals, legal-aid intake staff, and any lawyer explaining a court document to a client. PlainOrder is not legal advice. It's a translator. Disclaimers run at the top and bottom of every page; the footer links directly to the Legal Services Corporation legal-aid directory.
Open source under AGPL-3.0. Total response time ~10 seconds per document, on Cloudflare Workers + OpenRouter (Claude Sonnet). Built and shipped in a single weekend session.
What's next: a Spanish-language UI, jurisdiction-aware deadline math (when an order says "within 30 days of service," PlainOrder currently surfaces the formula but does not pick a calendar date), and PDF upload.
Looking for legal-aid orgs to dogfood it and tell us what's missing.