For journalists, podcasters, and writers

The one-paragraph version

DraftGrade is a quality-control system for legal drafting. It catches hallucinated citations (a Stanford study found LLMs invent 58–88% of legal citations) and scores motions against an open, peer-reviewable rubric. The methodology is open under AGPL and CC-BY-SA; the hosted service at draftgrade.com is the commercial implementation. The mission is access to justice: pro se litigants, legal-aid clinics, and overworked appointed counsel should not be the only people who can't afford the citation-verification work that big firms do automatically.

Key facts

Founder

Joseph M. Fusco, III · sole maintainer + LLC owner

Founded

2026

Hosted at

draftgrade.com (marketing) · app.draftgrade.com (service)

Open methodology

AGPL-3.0 (system prompt, reference Grader) + CC-BY-SA 4.0 (rubric, technique register, calibration set)

Calibration

Three exemplars on identical facts: A (95.5), B− (82), F (38). View set.

Accessibility

WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Statement.

Pricing

Free during MVP. Always free for pro se litigants.

Source

github.com/josephfusco/draftgrade

Pre-cleared quotes

Attribute to Joseph M. Fusco, III, founder, DraftGrade. Use verbatim or paraphrase.

• "Lawyers charge five hundred dollars an hour for work a rubric can verify in thirty seconds. The point of DraftGrade isn’t to replace lawyers; it’s to give the same automated checks to the people who can’t pay for them."

• "We open-sourced the methodology because a closed-box scoring system has no place in the legal system. Judges, opposing counsel, and pro se litigants should all be able to read the rubric we’re scoring against."

• "Every citation in every DraftGrade output is independently verified against CourtListener. LLMs hallucinate 58 to 88 percent of legal citations according to Stanford’s 2024 study—professional responsibility requires a human in the loop, but the rubric does the work of finding what they need to check."

Brand assets

All assets below are free to use in editorial context (articles, podcast art, conference slides). For commercial reuse, see the trademark policy.

Logo mark (square)

SVG, scalable. Use for favicons, social avatars.

Download SVG

Wordmark

SVG, scalable. Use for headers, signatures.

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Open Graph image

1200×630 PNG. Social previews, slide hero.

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Color palette

Things we'd appreciate you not doing

• Don't describe DraftGrade as "AI legal advice." It is not. It is automated quality control on human-written drafts.
• Don't call it a lawyer replacement. The mission is to make the work lawyers do automatically (citation checking, structure scoring) available to people without lawyers.
• Don't crop or recolor the logo. Use it as-shipped or use a wordmark text treatment.
• Don't claim the methodology is proprietary. It's open under AGPL + CC-BY-SA. Anyone can fork it; just rename (trademark policy).