Preparing a case

Create the case

A case names its forum, its parties, which side you represent, and the relief sought. That profile is what the room treats as on the record from the start — opposing counsel takes the other side by declaration, and the bench knows what you are asking it for.

Upload the pleading

The pleading is the case’s primary source of substance. Upload it as a PDF and LexGrit ingests it — extracts, chunks, embeds — so that objections, replies, and rulings are grounded in your actual filing rather than in a paragraph of summary. A rehearsal argued against your real pleading is a rehearsal of your real case.

Ingestion runs in the background; the document’s status resolves on the page. A corrected filing goes in through Replace, which keeps the old version live until the new one is ready.

Write the must-hit checklist

The things this argument has to address, in three kinds: the elements of the claim, the controlling authority, and the strongest counterargument. Authored once per case, scored on every rehearsal — which is what makes “you keep missing the timeliness element” a sentence the scorecard can say with a straight face.

Write them before the first session. A checklist written after the fact grades the argument you gave, not the one you needed to give.

Run the pre-mortem

The pre-mortem is a red team over your case theory: the strongest attacks against it, each with why it bites, what it targets, and how to shore it up — severity-ranked. Read it before arguing, the way you would want to hear the worst of it from a colleague rather than from the bench.

Re-running writes a new pre-mortem rather than editing the old one, so you can see whether the theory’s exposure changed as the pleading was corrected.

If the forum takes testimony by affidavit

Some proceedings are examined on a witness’s sworn affidavit rather than on live direct testimony. Those need a judicial affidavit on the case before the rehearsal means anything — the next article covers it.