About

Pleadit is a desktop application for attorneys who draft their own court documents. The core of the product is a brief editor for motions, memoranda, and appellate briefs, a 28-line California pleading editor, a letter and notice editor, auto-generating Tables of Authorities and Tables of Contents, an evidence locker, and a dynamic exhibit reference system. These features are jurisdiction-agnostic and work in all 50 states and across every practice area. Pleadit runs on macOS and Windows.

Pleadit also has a built-in form auto-populator. Any fillable PDF can be mapped to case-data variables once and reused as an auto-filling template; California attorneys additionally get 76 Judicial Council forms pre-mapped out of the box.

Pleadit is designed for solo practitioners and small firms across the United States who draft and file their own documents. The core editor and exhibit system are practice-area-agnostic and used in:

• Civil litigation — contract disputes, personal injury, employment, and property matters
• Immigration — EOIR (immigration court), USCIS petitions, and BIA appeals
• Criminal defense
• Probate
• Appellate practice — briefs with auto-updating Tables of Authorities and Tables of Contents
• Family law and domestic violence

Auto-populating forms. Pleadit's in-app Form Mapper lets any attorney upload any fillable PDF — federal forms, out-of-state court forms, county-specific local forms, agency and administrative forms — map the fields to case-data variables once, and save the result as a reusable template that auto-fills on every future use.

California attorneys additionally get 76 Judicial Council forms pre-mapped out of the box, covering family law (FL-), domestic violence (DV-), general civil (CIV-, CM-, MC-), civil pleadings (PLD-C-), personal injury (PLD-PI-), summons, subpoenas, judgments, and proof of service. The curated California library is being expanded on an ongoing basis. If a specific form would help your practice, reach out through the contact page.

Every new document opens with the caption already filled in from case data — court, county, case number, party names and roles, attorney block. No retyping the same heading on every motion, and templates built once work across every client.

Inline variable pills pull additional fields on demand:

• Client, party, and attorney profile fields
• Today's date, court, judge, department
• Firm logo and a drawn attorney signature
• In the pleading editor: figures from the built-in California child support calculator

Pills can be locked to freeze their current value — useful when “today's date” needs to be the filing date, not the date you reopen the file. A “Resolve All Variables” command bakes pills to plain text before export, so the filed PDF is plain content with no embedded fields.

Pleadit ships with a built-in form auto-populator. The in-app Form Mapper turns any fillable PDF into an auto-filling template — there is no separate purchase, no plug-in, no subscription tier to unlock it. Take a form you actually file — a federal civil cover sheet, an out-of-state court form, a county-specific subpoena, an agency form (USCIS, EOIR, IRS, SSA, VA), a local probate or bankruptcy form — drag the variables you need (client name, case number, attorney bar number, court county) onto the right fields, and save it. Every time you open that template for a case, the right caption, parties, and attorney block are already filled in.

The same case and client data that populates your briefs populates your forms. Enter your firm and attorney info once, each client and case once — every form and every brief draws from the same place after that.

If you practice in California, Pleadit also ships with 76 Judicial Council forms already mapped (FL-, DV-, CIV-, CM-, MC-, PLD-C-, PLD-PI-, summons, subpoenas, judgments, proof of service), so they auto-populate the moment you open them. Family law users also get a built-in California child support calculator comparable to DissoMaster, flowing directly into FL-150, FL-300, and the rest.

Every field stays editable in the in-app PDF viewer — type, add free text, sign with a drawn signature on your profile. Drafts are kept between sessions.

No. The brief editor, notice editor, evidence locker, exhibit system, and TOA/TOC features work in all 50 states and across every practice area; this is the core of the product, and it is what attorneys filing in federal court and in other states use day to day. The 28-line pleading editor is California-specific by design (it implements the Rules of Court line-numbered pleading-paper format).

Form auto-population is not California-only. Pleadit's in-app Form Mapper lets any attorney auto-fill any fillable PDF — federal forms, other states' court forms, county-specific local forms, agency and administrative forms — by mapping fields to case-data variables once and saving the result as a reusable template. California attorneys additionally get 76 Judicial Council forms pre-mapped as a bonus, but the auto-populator itself is jurisdiction-agnostic.

The editors in Pleadit are continuous — the document flows top to bottom the way a scroll of paper would, with visual page-break guides shown in the editor so you always know where one page ends and the next begins. Page numbers and footers are applied automatically at the moment you export to PDF, so the exported file carries proper page numbering and footer content even though the editor itself is continuous. This approach avoids the cursor and layout glitches that plague traditional page-by-page editors, while still producing a filing-ready PDF.

Footers and page numbers are fully customizable. Page number format can be set to Page 1, 1, 1 of N, - 1 -, or turned off entirely. Alignment can be set to left, center, or right. Footer text below the page number can use the document title, custom text, or be left blank.

Both editors expose a Page Setup panel for formatting control. What is adjustable depends on which editor you are in.

Brief editor (motions, memoranda, appellate briefs, federal filings, correspondence in notice mode). Fully customizable; the shipped presets — California Superior, California Court of Appeal, Federal District, 9th Circuit — are starting points, and any change can be saved as a custom preset.

• Margins — top, bottom, left, and right set independently to the hundredth of an inch (e.g. 1.25" left for binding, 1" elsewhere). On-screen Word-style dotted margin guides show exactly where they fall.
• Font and font size — Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, and Georgia. Document default is set per document; individual selections can be sized 8–18pt for footnotes, headers, or captions.
• Line spacing — double, 1.5, or single, configurable per paragraph. Body text can be double-spaced while TOC, TOA, block quotes, signature blocks, and certificates of service remain single-spaced.
• Footer and page numbers — page-number format (Page 1, 1, 1 of N, - 1 -, or off), alignment (left, center, right), front-matter Roman numerals with auto-detect, hide-on-first-page, and footer text source (document title, custom text, or blank).
• Heading styles — H1 through H5 individually configurable for indent, bold/italic/underline, all-caps, alignment, font size, marker gap, and space above/below.

28-line pleading editor (California pleading paper). The font (Courier New 12pt) and the page geometry (8.5×11 with the 28-line numbered grid) are intentionally fixed to keep documents compliant with California Rules of Court 2.104, 2.105, and 2.108 — those are not user-editable, by design. Within those constraints, Page Setup still controls page numbers and front-matter Roman numerals, footer text, TOA/TOC categories and titles, the passim rule, heading styles H1–H5, caption style (Open or Boxed), and an optional firm-logo letterhead in the left margin.

If a court's requirements cannot be expressed with the existing controls, reach out through the contact page — formatting gaps are treated as bugs.