Court requirements
Drafted to the requirements of the court you're filing in
Every court wants something slightly different — section headings, paragraph numbering, how the jurat is set out, what has to appear and in what order. Xcase holds a template for each combination of practice area and court, so a parenting affidavit for the FCFCOA is built to the FCFCOA's conventions rather than to a generic house format you then have to correct.
Family Law, Property, Employment and Personal Injury. FCFCOA, Supreme Court of NSW, Supreme Court of Victoria and VCAT.
Your drafting style
Tell it how you draft. It remembers.
First person or third. How you number and cross-reference. The phrases your principal insists on and the ones they will not have in a document. You write these once, in plain English, and every draft from then on follows them.
Preferences layer, so the firm's house style sits underneath, rules for a particular court sit on top of that, an individual lawyer's preferences on top of that, and anything specific to one matter — a judge with known views, say — on top of everything. You are not forced to choose between a firm standard and your own way of working.
And it improves. Each time you correct a draft you are teaching it, and the corrections you stop having to make are the measure of it working.
Review
Stop emailing Word documents around
No more affidavit_v4_FINAL_JB_comments.docx. The draft lives in the portal. Click any paragraph to edit it directly, or leave a comment and have it redrafted. Every version is kept, so you can see what changed, when, and what prompted it.
Anything you edit by hand is locked — the system will not quietly reword a correction you made deliberately. Export to Word when you're ready to file.
The transcript
It remembers what your client mentioned and forgot
Clients tell you things in passing and never repeat them. The whole interview is kept, so when you ask “did she say anything about the school run?” the answer comes from what she actually said rather than from anyone's memory of the conference.
That is where most of the time goes back. Queries you would normally resolve by phoning the client are usually already answered in the transcript — and you only go back to them when something genuinely is not there.