Drafting with AI

Draft it at home. Upload it here. A lawyer signs it.

We do not write your documents for you, and that is deliberate. You already have access to tools that draft well, they cost you little or nothing, and keeping the writing on your machine means the work and the judgment about it stay yours. What we do is give you somewhere to keep it, a calendar so it lands on time, and a licensed attorney who reads it before it goes to a court.

Read this before anything else: never file a case citation you have not read yourself. Every one of these tools will invent cases. They produce a case name, a reporter number, a year and a quotation that all look exactly right and do not exist. Lawyers have been fined, publicly named and referred to their bar for filing them. Open every case you intend to cite on a court website, Google Scholar or CourtListener and read it, or take it out. An argument with no citations is weaker. An argument with one invented citation is finished, and so is your credibility on everything else you said.

Which tool

Any of them will do this well. The differences that matter for legal drafting:

Claude

Handles long documents well, which matters when you paste a forty-page complaint and a timeline. Good at holding a factual record straight across a long conversation. Free tier is usually enough for one matter.

ChatGPT

The most widely used, so the most written about if you get stuck. Its file upload handles scanned PDFs well.

Codex, Claude Code and other terminal tools

Aimed at programmers, but they have one real advantage here: they work on a folder of files on your own computer. If you have fifty exhibits and a timeline in a spreadsheet, a tool that reads the whole folder beats pasting into a chat window.

Gemini and the rest

Fine. The method below matters far more than the choice.

We are not paid by any of these and do not resell them. Use whichever you already have.

The method

The mistake almost everyone makes is opening a chat and typing "write me a motion to dismiss". You get something that reads well, says nothing specific to your case, cites cases that may not exist, and that you cannot defend when a judge asks you a question about it. Work in steps instead.

Step 1: Give it the record before you ask for anything

Paste or attach your timeline, the documents you were served, and what you want to happen. Then tell it not to write yet.

Here is a timeline of what happened, and the documents I was served with. I am the respondent in a contested custody matter in Kings County, New York. I am representing myself. Do not draft anything yet. First, tell me: what facts am I asserting that I have no document to prove?

Step 2: Make it argue against you

This is the highest-value prompt in the whole process and almost nobody uses it. You cannot fix a weakness you have not seen.

Now act for the other side. Given these same facts, what are the three strongest arguments against me, and which of my own documents hurt me most? Be blunt. I would rather hear it now than from the judge.

Step 3: Ask for the facts only, with no law in it

Draft the statement of facts only. Chronological. One paragraph per event. Neutral tone. Cite my exhibit numbers. No legal conclusions, no adjectives about the other party, and do not cite any cases.

Telling it not to cite cases in the drafting pass is what keeps invented citations out of your document in the first place.

Step 4: Cut it down

Rewrite this for a judge with 200 other matters this week and four minutes for mine. Cut every sentence that does not change the outcome. Keep it under five pages.

Step 5: Check the format against the actual rules

Here are my court's local rules [paste them]. Check my document against them: caption, margins, font, page limit, certificate of service, and anything else they require. List only what is wrong.

Courts reject filings on formatting more often than on merit, and a rejection after a deadline is a lost case with a good argument inside it.

What not to ask it

  • "What should I do?" That is legal advice. It does not know your jurisdiction's quirks or your judge, and it will answer with total confidence anyway. That is the question to put to your attorney here.
  • "Find cases that support X." This is where fabrication lives. Find authority yourself on a court website first, then ask the model to explain what you found.
  • "Write my whole motion." You get something fluent that says nothing, and you will not be able to answer a single question about it in court.
  • "Is my case good?" It will tell you yes. It is not a neutral evaluator and it has no stake in being right.

Be careful what you paste

Anything you put into a consumer chatbot goes onto someone else's servers, and several of them train on your conversations unless you turn that off in settings. Before pasting, take out what the argument does not need: children's full names and schools, account and card numbers, medical details about third parties, social security numbers.

Two things worth knowing. Talking to a chatbot is not privileged: a court can order it produced, and it is not protected the way a conversation with your lawyer is. And once your attorney here is engaged, what you tell them through this platform is confidential and privileged, which is a real difference and a good reason to ask them the hard questions rather than the model.

Then bring it here

  1. Upload the draft to your case file, marked my draft.
  2. Upload what you were served with and the documents you are relying on.
  3. Send the draft for review. It routes only to attorneys licensed where your matter is.
  4. They read it, correct it, and either sign it or send it back with notes.

An attorney reading a well-prepared draft is checking things you cannot check yourself: whether the legal standard is right for this court this year, whether every citation is real, whether you have admitted something without realising, whether there is a procedural trap, and whether there is a stronger argument you did not know existed.

Start your case The full playbook