Document Extraction Platform + CMS Import · Florida Panhandle
First Judicial Circuit — Court PDFs to Sanity with Pith
We built Pith, a document extraction platform the First Judicial Circuit still uses to convert and import thousands of legacy court PDFs into structured Sanity content — turning archives into queryable, publishable data.
First Judicial Circuit of Florida · Visit live site
Challenge
The First Judicial Circuit holds thousands of legacy court PDFs — decades of documents that were hard to search, reuse, or publish cleanly. Manual re-entry was not viable. They needed a pipeline that could extract structure from PDFs and land trustworthy records in Sanity at scale, without pausing day-to-day court operations.
Approach
We built Pith (app.pith.tools) as a document extraction platform: ingest PDFs, extract structured fields, review/correct, and import into Sanity. The circuit’s team runs the pipeline themselves — converting and importing legacy court documents in ongoing batches rather than a one-time dump.
Outcome
Pith is live and in active use. The First Judicial Circuit continues to process thousands of old court PDFs into structured Sanity data, building a durable content archive that the public-facing Gatsby site and internal workflows can actually use.
A second JUD1 engagement — the document layer
Accessibility got the public site usable. The next bottleneck was content trapped in PDFs. Court archives do not behave like blog posts: scanned filings, uneven templates, and volume that breaks spreadsheet workflows. JUD1 needed software for extraction and import, not another brochure page.
What Pith does
Pith is FlintHorn’s document extraction platform at app.pith.tools. Operators upload court PDFs, extract structured data, review results, and push clean records into Sanity — the same CMS behind the First Judicial Circuit site.
Still running in production
This is not a finished pilot on a shelf. The circuit’s team is actively converting and importing thousands of legacy PDFs through Pith today. Volume compounds: every successful batch makes the archive more searchable and publishable than the PDF pile it replaced.
Related work
See the companion case study on the public-site accessibility work: First Judicial Circuit ADA remediation.
Related: public site platform
The public site’s Drupal → Gatsby migration and Algolia search are covered separately: Drupal to Gatsby + Algolia.