Hey everyone! 
We wanted to share a tutorial we put together on automating one of the most repetitive tasks in legal practice: turning client intake data into properly formatted pleading papers.
Pleading papers are foundational court documents (Complaints, Answers, Counterclaims, Motions…) that follow strict formatting rules regarding specific fonts, margins, line spacing, line numbers. Creating them manually from client intake forms means repetitive data entry and a real risk of human error.
We built a workflow using three tools:
- Make to orchestrate the whole thing
- Typeform to collect client intake data (built in minutes using Typeform’s AI form builder)
- DocuGenerate to generate the properly formatted PDF from a Word template
Whenever a client submits the intake form, the scenario automatically:
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Watches for new Typeform responses
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Generates the pleading paper PDF via the DocuGenerate module, mapping form fields to template merge tags
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Fetches the generated file with an HTTP module
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Uploads it straight to a Dropbox folder, ready for review and filing
One interesting gotcha we ran into along the way: multi-line text (like the “Body of Pleading” field) can break JSON parsing between modules because of raw newline characters. The fix is a simple replace step using Make’s text functions to escape newlines before they hit the DocuGenerate action.
The same pattern easily extends beyond pleading papers to answers, counterclaims, motions, or any other structured legal document, and the Typeform step could just as easily be swapped for a trigger from your practice management software.
You can read the full step-by-step tutorial on our blog (with the actual template, and a sample generated PDF). Happy to answer questions if anyone wants to adapt this for their own use case.