Increasingly, public access to civil lawsuits against law enforcement agencies has been restricted from federal to local levels. Through the use of public record requests, the Human Rights Defense Center has collected over 8000 civil cases from seven different states. Their goal: to create a publicly accessible and empirically analyzable database of civil lawsuits against law enforcement agencies all across the country. Our team has built the underlying structure for this larger project, developing a Descriptive Metadata Schema, Controlled Vocabulary and Claim Type, Controlled Vocabulary and Dictionary for Document Type, and Standard Operating Procedures for court record ingest and documentation.