Pleading starters are a good way to get started in document automation. These templates simply generate the caption and signature block, allowing you to jump right into the substantive portion of your document. The attached template demonstrates some basic concepts for building one of these. It can be downloaded and edited for a firm’s personal use.
Some features included here are:
- Multiple Parties: Clio Draft doesn’t include a ‘repeating item.’ This is a feature that allows you to generate any number of a data point. So, for example, you can add one or more children, no limit. In Clio Draft, however, we build for the most common use cases. If you typically have no more than three plaintiffs, we build the template for P1, P2, and P3, no more. This template demonstrates how to build for 1-3 Plaintiffs, 1-3 Defendants, and 1-2 Attorneys.
- Multiple Party Types: We demonstrate how to build for multiple party types (Plaintiff/Defendant or Petitioner/Respondent)
- Operating Variables: Sometimes we’ll insert variables into a document simply to enable a condition to operate. In this case, for example, we inserted a variable identifying which party the attorney serves. This way we have the data we need to ensure the proper conditional text is inserted at ‘Attorneys for ______.’ We don’t actually want the operatin variable text for the document. It can simply be deleted, added on a separate ‘tear-away’ page, or hidden in a footer.
There are actually several other ways to handle the challenge described here. We provide it here mostly for demonstration purposes. But, we do adopt this method when, for example, we’d like to keep our questionnaire organized. Here, we identify which party the attorney is representing on the attorney card, not elsewhere in the questionnaire. - Nested Conditionals: All conditions must be met before texted nested within more than one conditional appears in your document. Here, for example ‘Attorney for Petitioners‘ will only apply if Party Type = Petitioner/Respondent, Attorney 1 Represents Petitioner, AND there’s more than one Petitioner. All three conditions must be met.
Schedule a time if you’d like to review this template together.
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