card

README.md

@@ -500,6 +500,24 @@ The record is **federal-heavy**, and that is a property of the world, not of thi
 CourtListener a machine-readable feed for every federal court, while most state trial courts publish
 no bulk docket data at all. A state absent from a count is one with no open feed, not one withheld.
 
+## The viewer, and why two configs preview partially
+
+Hugging Face converts each config to parquet up to a **5 GB in-memory ceiling**, measured here rather
+than assumed: `federal-district` stopped at 5,001,023,741 bytes and `all` at 5,003,462,887. So in the
+browser those two show a partial preview — `federal-district` previews 7,490,694 of its
+23,795,525 rows, `all` previews 7,596,221 of 34,290,148.
+
+**Nothing is missing from the data.** `load_dataset` and a plain download read every shard; the cap
+applies only to the browsable parquet preview. The other **eight configs convert completely**, and
+every one of their converted row counts matches the count measured on our own files exactly:
+`state` 6,841,279 · `federal-special` 1,605,763 · `federal-appellate` 1,341,708 · `scotus` 589,547 ·
+`territorial` 63,006 · `federal-bankruptcy` 27,619 · `other` 23,563 · `tribal` 2,138.
+
+We kept the tier sharding rather than splitting the federal district courts further, because the
+alternatives — by circuit, by state — are not in the source table (CourtListener gives every district
+court the same `parent_court_id`, `usdistct`), and we do not add facts the source does not carry.
+Files are held at about 100 MB each, 40 in total, which is the size the converter handles comfortably.
+
 ## Format
 
 Rows follow **docketx record v1**, one docket per line, **every column a string**: