Not the federal courts in Wisconsin
This page covers the Wisconsin state circuit courts. The federal districts sitting in Wisconsin run CM/ECF, a completely separate system with its own limits — the Eastern District's per-document ceiling is 75 MB. The two are regularly confused.
In the circuit court system the 50 MB figure applies to the document being uploaded, and the court's own support material is explicit that larger documents must be divided before upload.
Why a filing gets this large
Fifty megabytes is roomy for text and finite for images. Documents that exceed it are scans, photographs, or exports that embedded imagery at capture resolution.
Scanner settings are the dominant factor. Color capture stores three bytes per pixel where greyscale stores one, and each doubling of DPI quadruples the pixel count. A page captured at 600 DPI in color can be an order of magnitude larger than the same page captured at 300 DPI in greyscale, with no difference a reader would notice on screen.
For a file that already exists, compression performs the same reduction after the fact — resampling the embedded images and re-encoding them, while leaving genuine text objects in the document untouched.
If the file is an exhibit
Lossy compression alters a file. Every byte of the output differs from the input, even where the page looks identical on screen, and that can matter if the document's authenticity is ever contested. ShrinkWrit shows the SHA-256 hash of the file you started with and the file it produced, so the change is documented rather than invisible.
The lossless mode strips metadata and repacks the file without touching a single pixel or sample. It saves less, and on a heavily scanned document it may not reach the limit at all — but when it does, the image data is bit-for-bit what it was. Your original is never modified either way; the output is always a new file.
Common questions
- What is the Wisconsin circuit court file size limit?
- 50 MB. Documents above that must be split into smaller files before upload.
- Is that the same as the federal courts in Wisconsin?
- No. The federal districts use CM/ECF with separate figures — 75 MB per document in the Eastern District. This page covers the state circuit courts.
- Is splitting or compressing better?
- That is a question about your filing rather than about the file, and it is one for the court or an attorney. What can be said technically is that a scanned document will usually compress by 80–90% with no loss of legibility, so compression often removes the need to decide.
- Does this tool keep a copy of my document?
- No. Everything happens in your browser; there is no server involved and nothing is stored. Closing the tab discards it entirely.
The 50 MB figure on this page was last checked against the court’s own notice on Jul 2026. Limits change without much announcement — confirm it at the source before you file.