Clutch Justice has launched The Lab: a suite of interactive tools built to make Michigan’s judicial accountability systems more legible. The Lab currently includes two weekly puzzles, The Docket and Clutch Connects, and The Dossier, a step-by-step guide to filing a complaint with the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission. All three are free and live now.
Why The Lab exists
Most people who end up in a Michigan courtroom have no idea how the system is supposed to work. They do not know what a judge is permitted to do, what constitutes a complaint, or that the Judicial Tenure Commission exists at all. By the time they find out, the moment has usually passed.
Clutch Justice was built on the premise that accountability reporting only works if the people most affected by the systems being reported on can actually use what gets published. An investigation into JTC dismissal rates is valuable. A tool that helps someone understand whether their experience qualifies as misconduct is more immediately useful to the person sitting across from a judge tomorrow morning.
The Lab is the infrastructure for that second kind of usefulness. It is not a replacement for reporting. It is the layer that makes reporting actionable.
Every tool in The Lab is built to run inside a WordPress Custom HTML block with no external dependencies. No app to download, no account to create, no paywall. If you have a browser, you have access.
The Docket
The Docket is a logic deduction puzzle in the tradition of Murdle, rebuilt for the Michigan judicial accountability beat. Each week, four fictional judges appear before the Judicial Tenure Commission. Each presides in a different county, each complaint alleges a different category of misconduct, and each case reaches a different resolution.
Readers use ten clues to work out who is from where, what they were accused of, and how the JTC disposed of the matter. The judges are invented. The complaint categories and outcome types are drawn directly from real JTC processes.
The puzzle is solvable through logic alone. No guessing required. The answer is in the clues.
Play Issue 01 ?Clutch Connects
Clutch Connects draws sixteen terms from Michigan courts, the JTC, public defense, and judicial accountability and asks readers to sort them into four thematic groups. Each group has a cryptic title. The connection is never just the obvious one.
Every puzzle contains a disputed district: one term that appears to belong to one group but actually belongs to another. It is the puzzle’s central misdirection, and the reveal explains exactly why it lands where it does. Four guesses. No partial credit.
The terms are drawn from the same vocabulary that appears throughout Clutch Justice’s reporting. Playing Clutch Connects is, among other things, a way to learn how these systems actually talk about themselves.
Play Issue 01 ?The Dossier
The Dossier is not a puzzle. It is a guided walkthrough of the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission complaint process, built for people who actually need to use it.
It covers six stages: what the JTC can and cannot do, whether the conduct qualifies as misconduct, what to document before filing, the mechanics of the form itself, what happens during the investigation, and what to do when the process ends without the outcome you wanted. Every step is grounded in the actual Michigan Court Rules and JTC procedures.
The JTC cannot be filed with electronically. Michigan Court Rules require an original notarized signature on every Request for Investigation. The Dossier walks through this and every other friction point most people do not find out about until after they needed to know.
The Dossier does not provide legal advice. It provides civic literacy. Those are different things, and Michigan’s court system depends on most people never acquiring the second one.
Open The Dossier ?What comes next
The Lab is a living section of the site. Additional tools are in development, including a case timeline builder for active investigations and a conviction rate explorer built on the Barry County data published here in 2024. The tools will be added as they are ready, not on a fixed schedule.
If you have used The Dossier and want to share what you encountered, or if you have a suggestion for a tool that would have made a difference in your own experience with Michigan courts, the address is hello@clutchjustice.com.
The puzzles publish weekly. The Dossier is always open. All of it is free.
Sources and Documentation
Rita Williams, Introducing The Lab: Interactive Tools for Understanding Michigan Courts, Clutch Justice (Apr. 10, 2025), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/04/07/introducing-the-lab-clutch-justice/.
Williams, R. (2025, April 10). Introducing the lab: Interactive tools for understanding Michigan courts. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/04/07/introducing-the-lab-clutch-justice/
Williams, Rita. “Introducing The Lab: Interactive Tools for Understanding Michigan Courts.” Clutch Justice, 10 Apr. 2025, clutchjustice.com/2026/04/07/introducing-the-lab-clutch-justice/.
Williams, Rita. “Introducing The Lab: Interactive Tools for Understanding Michigan Courts.” Clutch Justice, April 10, 2025. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/04/07/introducing-the-lab-clutch-justice/.
