Tenthliner
LegalTech platform for Kenyan court e-filing compliance.
Scaled to handle large PDFs with 2,000+ pages
ProductBackendInfrastructureCustomer Support
DjangoPyMuPDFCeleryRedisSeaweedFSClamAVDockerPaystack
Problem
Kenyan courts require PDFs filed with them to meet strict e-filing requirements, including line numbering every ten lines, known as tenthlining. Getting this wrong risks a filing being rejected outright.
What I built
Tenthliner is a PDF ingestion pipeline built for lawyers, handling text PDFs, scanned PDFs, handwritten PDFs, and mixed documents correctly, including documents over 2,000 pages long.
It runs the numbering as a background job, so a lawyer can close the browser and come back for the result, with Paystack handling billing.
Lessons
- Customer support is about reassurance as much as bug fixing.
- Simplifying onboarding dramatically increased adoption.
- Built around real user feedback, not assumptions.