LaelaZ/illinois-divorce-court-corpus

Illinois Divorce: Legal-Information Corpus (process, forms & procedure)

⚖️ This is legal information, not legal advice. It's an educational reference, not a lawyer. It can't tell you what to do in your case, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. Court rules, forms, fees, and deadlines change, and they vary by county, so verify anything here against the cited official source before you rely on it, and for advice about your own situation talk to a licensed Illinois attorney or to legal aid. This dataset is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Illinois Courts, Cook County, or Illinois Legal Aid Online.

Ask a general chatbot how to file for divorce in Illinois and it will happily invent a form number, a fee, or a filing deadline. That confident-and-wrong failure is the thing this corpus is built against.

It's a set of short, citation-grounded passages that walk the Illinois divorce process end to end: the residency rule and the grounds, dividing property and debts, maintenance, parental responsibilities and child support, the timeline, how you serve your spouse, the statewide approved court forms, and the rules for appearing remotely. Every passage carries its source and a URL, so it works as a clean grounding corpus for retrieval and RAG. It's the corpus behind ParaPilot, a grounded legal-information Q&A demo.

Sources

The passages come from two kinds of sources, and both are restated in original wording, never copied. Court rules and official court forms are government works and aren't subject to copyright, so those summaries are straightforward. The process and service passages summarize facts that Illinois Legal Aid Online (ILAO) publishes for the public. ILAO is a nonprofit and its own writing is copyrighted, so none of ILAO's text is reproduced here: only the underlying facts, which belong to no one, put in my own words, with a link to ILAO's full guide for the authoritative version.

source_id	Source	Rows
ilao_getting_divorce	Illinois Legal Aid Online (facts, reworded)	12
illinoiscourts_forms	Illinois Courts, approved forms	9
service_and_procedure	ILAO + Illinois Courts (facts, reworded)	6
rule45_remote	Supreme Court of Illinois, Rule 45	3
cookcounty_remote	Circuit Court of Cook County	3
Total		33

Schema

One JSON object per passage:

field	type	description
id	string	passage id, unique within a source
source_id	string	which source (see the table above)
title	string	source document title
publisher	string	where the facts come from (a government body, or ILAO)
jurisdiction	string	IL or IL-Cook
topic	string	divorce, forms, service, or remote_appearance
heading	string	short passage heading
text	string	the passage
url	string	source URL for this passage
tags	list[string]	keywords and common phrasings
retrieved	string	retrieval date (2026-06-03)
license_note	string	source-specific caveat

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

corpus = load_dataset("LaelaZ/illinois-divorce-court-corpus", split="train")

# Embed `text` for retrieval, and keep `url` so an answer can cite its source
for r in corpus.select(range(2)):
    print(r["heading"], "->", r["url"])

What it's good for, and what it isn't

Use it as a small, well-cited grounding corpus for RAG and legal-NLP demos: retrieval, grounded Q&A, citation and attribution. It's also a worked example of source-tagged knowledge passages where every claim points back to where it came from.

Two things to keep in mind. It's small, 33 passages, and focused on one topic: the Illinois divorce process, its forms, service, and remote appearances, nothing wider. And the passages are summaries, not the verbatim official text, retrieved on 2026-06-03, so they can go out of date. It is not legal advice, and it doesn't replace the official forms, the current rule text, or a lawyer.

License & attribution

The compilation and the summaries are released under CC BY 4.0 © 2026 Laela Zorana. The underlying facts come from public Illinois sources: government publications (court rules and official forms, which aren't copyrightable) and ILAO's public legal-information guide (facts restated in original wording, not ILAO's own text). When you reuse a passage, cite its url.

@misc{zorana_il_divorce_corpus_2026,
  author = {Laela Zorana},
  title  = {Illinois Divorce: Legal-Information Corpus (process, forms & procedure)},
  year   = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/LaelaZ/illinois-divorce-court-corpus}}
}

Built from the ParaPilot project.