DocketShield

In Georgia you get 7 days to answer an eviction. Most tenants lose on the date, not the law. Snap your papers: DocketShield gets the date right and drafts the Answer.

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Try it live: docketshield-app.vercel.app. Tap "Try with a sample case" to run the full flow in about a minute, no sign-up needed.

A knock on the door, and a 7-day clock

A deputy hands you papers on a Saturday morning. Somewhere on them is a date, and if you miss it you can lose your home without ever seeing a judge. In Georgia you have 7 days to file an Answer. On day 8, the landlord can ask to remove you.

This happens in metro Atlanta more than anywhere else in America: about 144,000 eviction filings in a year, 24 for every 100 renter households, three times the national average. Roughly 15% of those filings come from just 100 buildings.

Most tenants don't lose on the law. They lose on time, confusion, and a single wrong date.

What DocketShield does

Snap a photo of your eviction papers. In under a minute you get:

Your exact deadline, proven. Weekends count, holidays roll forward, and the court closes at 5:00 PM. A Saturday service in October slides past the weekend and Columbus Day to Tuesday. DocketShield shows every step of the math, naming each skipped day. A paper-vs-law cross-check. The deadline printed on the papers is checked against Georgia's rule, computed from the service date. If they disagree, DocketShield says so loudly and tells you to use the earlier date and call the clerk today. Only the options that actually work. Pay-and-stay for a first filing, the new 3-day notice defense (Georgia's 2024 Safe at Home law, which most tenants have never heard of), illegal lockout and repair counterclaims. It also states plainly what is not a defense, so no one wastes their seven days. A court-ready Answer. It's drafted on the same checkboxes as Georgia's official Answer form, and every checked box shows the fact that justifies it. If the landlord changed the locks or shut off utilities, the draft says so in the form's own words. The tenant or a legal aid lawyer reviews it; DocketShield never files anything by itself.

Why you can trust it

Every rule cites the court that wrote it, and every source in the app is a link to the original: the Fulton County Magistrate Court Tenant Pamphlet, the official DeKalb County Answer form, and the Georgia.gov holiday proclamation. The AI is never trusted blindly. The vision agent returns each field with a confidence score and the exact text it read. Impossible dates are rejected, weak fields go back to the tenant to confirm, and the deadline is recomputed by deterministic code, never by the model. It fails closed. If DocketShield can't be sure, it says so and points you to your papers and the clerk. It's built for a phone in a hard moment: mobile-first, plain language, no account, and a hardened site (strict content security policy, HTTPS-only, camera access only for scanning papers).

Proof it works

Live test: Gemini read a sample warrant (synthetic data) and extracted 10 of 10 fields correctly. The deadline printed on the paper, Oct 13, matched the rules engine exactly. When the first model hit a rate limit, the agent switched to a backup model on its own. 35 automated tests pin hand-checked dates, including Thanksgiving plus the state holiday after it, and Georgia's December 24–25 closures, plus every Answer-form box and the signature block's fit on a phone screen. The full flow (sample papers → deadline → situation questions → options → draft Answer) runs end to end on the live site against the live API.

How we built it

Tenant app: TanStack Start + React + Tailwind, every API response validated with Zod · Rules API: TypeScript deadline engine, triage and Answer drafter on Vercel Functions · Gemini vision extraction with strict JSON schema, confidence scores and evidence · Vitest · open source on GitHub.

What's next

SMS countdown reminders, routing for all five metro counties, Spanish, and a serial-filer signal built from public filing data.

DocketShield gives legal information, not legal advice. Free help: Housing Court Assistance Center, Atlanta Legal Aid Society, Georgia Legal Services Program, Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation.

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