Say your landlord wants to raise your rent. How much notice do they owe you?
If you live in Washington, the answer is scattered across at least five different government websites. State statute is in one place. Agency rules are in another. The court that would hear the case has its own rules, published differently depending on which city you're in. None of it is connected to anything else.
We spent the last few months connecting it.
The full archive is free and open at github.com/Civic-Informer/wa-state-legal. It is the first deliverable of Project o-civ, our broader effort to make civic information actually usable.
The problem is simple but enormous
To put it together, we had to pull roughly 3,825 separate documents off official government websites. Most were PDFs. Some were buried inside content management systems. A few were scanned images of paper rulebooks.
After cleaning all of that up, what came out the other side was 1,059 plain text files covering every binding rule in the state. Statutes, regulations, court procedure, top to bottom.
Accessibility in 2026
Like most states, Washington publishes its laws online. The Legislature, courts, and cities all have websites with varying methods of hosting this information. You can, in theory, read any of it for free.
In practice, finding what you actually need is a needle in a haystack. Information is split across dozens of publishers, in dozens of formats, with no map between them. Lawyers pay $100 a month or more for tools like Westlaw to navigate that mess on your behalf. The rest of us mostly give up.
Whether the gap is an accident, or a business model of paid legal research, it's a gap in something that should be fundamentally accessible.
Available is not the same as accessible. If you cannot find the answer, the answer might as well not exist.
The newer twist is AI. People ask ChatGPT about their rights and the model gives confident answers. Oftentimes, those answers are completely made up. Real judges have sanctioned real lawyers for filing briefs full of cases that did not exist, because the assistant invented them.
The fix: 7 Washington law AI skills & markdown accessibility
For people who use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other model supporting "skills," you can now talk to your AI about legal matters in Washington State with confidence. Each skill is uniquely designed to stop AI hallucinations when discussing Washington state law, made possible by AI-accessible information.
The Skills:
- RCW Titles 1-50: the first half of the Revised Code of Washington (criminal, family, education, employment, elections)
- RCW Titles 51-91: the second half (taxes, workers' comp, healthcare, public lands, wildlife)
- Washington Administrative Code: how state agencies actually implement those statutes
- State Court Rules: civil, criminal, evidence, and appellate procedure
- County Superior Court Local Rules: local procedure for all 32 county Superior Courts
- District Court Local Rules: local procedure for 40 district courts
- Municipal Court Local Rules: local procedure for 107 city municipal courts
What we want to be true in a few years
For most of the past century, "public law" meant that someone, somewhere, had printed it. That was the whole standard.
That is not enough anymore. Public has to mean findable, readable, and trustworthy when a machine reads it on your behalf. Anything less is a paywall in disguise, paid in time instead of dollars.
This release is one state. Washington was the place to start because we already live here. If you are working on the same problem somewhere else, in zoning, permits, court records, public meetings, any layer of civic information that should be easier to read, get in touch. The legal layer is just the first piece of Project o-civ.