We built Docket Build because a good petition lost on an indexing failure.

Founding thesis

Immigration law is one of the few practice areas where the quality of the filing and the quality of the argument are almost separable — and where the first one silently determines the outcome of the second.

In 2024, Rohan Desai had been practising US business immigration for eleven years and had personally filed over 1,900 employment and merit-based petitions. Priya Venkatesan had spent nine years building document automation for regulated filings, most recently leading a legal workflow group in Bengaluru. They met over a specific case: an EB-1A petition with a strong record that drew a Request for Evidence asking for peer review documentation which was already in the filing, at pages 84 to 112 of a 610-page binder with a flat, un-annotated index.

The response took eleven unbillable hours under a flat fee. Nothing new was submitted. The paralegal simply built the index the packet should have had in the first place, and the petition was approved.

They spent the next eight months inside four boutique immigration practices with a stopwatch. The finding was consistent: twelve to twenty hours of every merit-based petition went into renaming files, checking translations, typing exhibit indexes, applying Bates numbers and repairing citations after an exhibit moved. None of it required legal judgement. All of it happened at the end of the matter, under deadline, which is exactly when errors enter a record.

Docket Build, Inc. was incorporated in Bengaluru in the first quarter of 2025 to remove that layer — and only that layer. The attorney keeps the law. The software takes the mechanics.