Create a Case Study

Case File

The complete set of documents a legal team keeps for a single matter, including every pleading, motion, discovery instrument, order, and calendared deadline. Documents in a file are read against one another, so a date or a party name that appears one way in the complaint and a different way in the answer is a defect anyone reviewing the file will catch. Building one internally consistent file from a single fact pattern is what this project asks of you.

Count

A separately numbered section of a complaint that states one cause of action, with its own allegations and its own request for relief. Putting each legal theory in its own count lets the defendant respond to them separately and lets a court dismiss one without disturbing the others. A two-count complaint can survive as to one count and lose the other.

Failure to State a Cause of Action

The ground for dismissal under Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.140(b)(6), which argues that even if every factual allegation is true, the law provides no remedy on those facts. It tests the legal sufficiency of the pleading rather than the truth of what the pleading says. A party who presses a claim unsupported in law or fact can also be ordered to pay the other side’s attorney’s fees under section 57.105 of the Florida Statutes, which is why no competent lawyer would plead the second count you are about to write.

Affirmative Defense

A defense that defeats or narrows the plaintiff’s claim even when the plaintiff’s allegations are true, raised in the answer under Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.110(d). Comparative negligence and the statute of limitations are common examples in a negligence case. A defendant who omits an available affirmative defense from the answer can lose the right to raise it later.

Certificate of Service

A signed statement at the end of a filed document identifying who was served with it, on what date, and by what method. Florida practice runs service through the statewide e-filing portal in most cases, so the certificate ordinarily recites electronic service on the email addresses the parties have designated. A document that requires one and lacks it is incomplete on its face.

Standard Form Interrogatories

Interrogatory forms the Florida Supreme Court has approved for particular categories of cases, published in the forms section of the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure. Rule 1.340(a) requires a party to use the approved form for its initial interrogatories when a form exists for that type of action, which means a set drafted from scratch can be improper even when every question in it is sensible. Federal practice has no equivalent requirement, so this is a place where a model trained mostly on federal material tends to go wrong.

Uniform Case Management Order

The standing order a Florida circuit uses to set deadlines in civil cases, adopted by the chief judge under Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.200 as rewritten effective January 1, 2025. In the Seventh Judicial Circuit, Administrative Order CV-2024-023-SC directs the clerks of Flagler, Putnam, St. Johns, and Volusia Counties to file that order in civil cases, so the deadlines in your file come from the order rather than from anything the parties negotiate. Every date in it runs from a fixed starting point that you have to identify before you can calculate anything.

Fabricated Authority

A citation, quotation, or rule that an AI model produces in convincing form when the source does not exist or does not say what the model claims. Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing briefs built on invented cases. In a file where one count is deliberately baseless, a model asked to support that count is unusually likely to manufacture authority for it, which makes this project a live test of whether you check.

Part 1: Set the Case and Build the Fact Pattern

Start by generating the facts, because every document that follows has to be consistent with them. Run the Fact Pattern Builder prompt to produce a negligence dispute set in Volusia County, with named parties, specific dates, and enough concrete detail that each element of negligence has at least one fact behind it. Read what comes back with the question you learned to ask in the pre-suit module: could a plaintiff actually prove duty, breach, causation, and damages from these facts? Where the answer is thin, push the model for more detail or supply it yourself. Fix the date of the incident, the date of service on the defendant, and the filing date now and write them down, because you will be calculating deadlines from them later and changing one of them halfway through will corrupt the whole file.

Part 2: Draft the Pleadings

Now draft the complaint. It has two counts. Count I is a properly pleaded negligence claim that satisfies Florida’s ultimate-facts standard under Rule 1.110(b), with a caption naming the court and the parties, numbered paragraphs, a statement of the court’s jurisdiction and venue, and a prayer for relief. Count II asks the court to order the defendant to issue a written apology, which is not a cause of action Florida law recognizes. Plead it anyway, in proper form, because the point of this project is to see whether you can tell the difference between a claim that is defective in form and one that is defective in law. Before you accept whatever the model produces for Count II, run the Non-Existent Claim Prober prompt and watch closely for authority it invents to prop the count up.

Then draft the answer. It responds to every numbered allegation in both counts with an admission, a denial, or a statement that the defendant lacks knowledge sufficient to admit or deny, and it raises at least two affirmative defenses that actually fit your facts rather than a generic list. Check section 768.81 and Rule 1.110(d) before you settle on which defenses to plead. Close it with a certificate of service.

Part 3: Draft the Motion to Dismiss Count II

Draft a motion attacking Count II alone and leaving Count I in the case. The ground is failure to state a cause of action under Rule 1.140(b)(6), and the argument is that Florida law recognizes no claim for a compelled written apology, so no set of facts pleaded in that count entitles the plaintiff to the relief requested. Read Rule 1.140 in the current Chapter 1 text before you draft, and pay attention to what the rule says about when this motion is filed and what happens to the defendant’s time to answer. Include a certificate of service. If the AI hands you a case citation supporting dismissal, confirm on Google Scholar that the case is real and says what the draft claims before it goes anywhere near your file.

Part 4: Draft the Discovery Documents

Prepare the plaintiff’s first set of interrogatories to the defendant. Before you draft anything, open the forms section of Chapter 1 and find out whether the Florida Supreme Court has approved a standard interrogatory form for a negligence action of this kind. Rule 1.340(a) requires the approved form for a party’s initial interrogatories where one exists, and a model drafting from federal habits will almost always write its own set instead, so this is one of the sharper traps in the project. Note in your reflection what the model did and what the rule required.

Then work out what actually gets filed. Interrogatories are served on the other party, and the rules treat filing separately, so read Rule 1.340 together with the filing provisions of Rule 1.280 in the current text and prepare the notice the rules call for. The 2025 amendments moved and reworded several of these requirements, so confirm what the rule says today rather than reproducing a form you found online. If the current rules turn out not to require what you expected, say so in your reflection instead of producing a document the rule does not call for.

Part 5: Build the Case Management Calendar

Build a timeline of the deadlines this case will face. Open Administrative Order CV-2024-023-SC and read the Uniform Case Management Order attached to it as Exhibit A, then read Rule 1.200 in the current Chapter 1 text so you understand the three case tracks and the track assignment requirement the order implements. Identify the date every deadline in the order runs from, state in the calendar which date you chose and why you chose it, and derive each deadline from the order and the rule rather than from an AI’s summary of them. Use the Deadline Derivation Checker prompt to organize the dates, then confirm every one of them against the order text yourself. Before you rely on CV-2024-023-SC, search the circuit’s administrative order database and confirm it has not been rescinded or replaced, because an order that governed last year is worth nothing if the chief judge has since issued a new one.

Part 6: Write the Federal Contrast Note

Close the file with a note of roughly 300 to 400 words on how this same case would run in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Address the pleading standard your complaint would have to meet, the defendant’s deadline to respond, the rule number the motion to dismiss would cite, what changes about the interrogatories, and where the schedule would come from. Cite the specific federal rule for each point and set it against its Florida counterpart, so the note reads as a comparison rather than a federal summary. This is the shortest document in the file and the one that shows most directly whether you understand the two systems as two systems.

Part 7: Verify the Law and Assemble the Case File

Now go back through everything and check it. Every rule number, every statutory citation, every deadline, and every case has to be confirmed against the primary source: the Florida Bar’s rules page for the procedural rules, the Legislature’s site for the statutes, the circuit’s site for the administrative order, and Google Scholar for any case. Keep a short log of what held up and what did not, because your reflection depends on it. Then run the Case File Consistency Auditor prompt across the full set and fix every contradiction it surfaces, whether that is a date that shifted between the complaint and the answer, a party name that changed spelling, or a paragraph the answer failed to respond to.

Assemble the finished documents into a single PDF in this order: the fact pattern you worked from, the complaint, the answer, the motion to dismiss Count II, the interrogatories, the notice, the case management calendar, and the federal contrast note. Format it as a professional would, with consistent captions, consistent typography, and page numbers.

Part 8: Write the Process Reflection

Post a reflection of 300 to 400 words to the course forum with your PDF attached. Cover where AI genuinely sped up the drafting and where it was unreliable, and give one specific correction you had to make to an AI-generated draft along with why the correction was necessary. Address Count II directly: what did the model do when you asked it to plead and then to defend a cause of action that does not exist, and what does section 57.105 suggest about why a real lawyer would never file it. Close with what the work of turning raw facts into formal documents taught you that reading the rules alone did not.

Part 9: Share Chat Link

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

Fact Pattern Builder

I need a fictional fact pattern for a negligence lawsuit that I will use to draft an entire case file, so the facts have to be specific enough to support every document that follows. Before you write anything, ask me three questions: what kind of negligence scenario I want, whether the defendant should be an individual or a business, and roughly how serious the plaintiff’s injuries are. After I answer, generate the dispute set in Volusia County, Florida, with invented names for the plaintiff, the defendant, and any witnesses, and do not use the name of any real person or real business. Give me a numbered set of facts, and organize them so that duty, breach, causation, and damages are each supported by at least one specific fact. Fix and state clearly the date of the incident, the date the complaint is filed, and the date the defendant is served, since I will calculate deadlines from those. Do not draft any legal document yet and do not state legal conclusions; give me only the facts.

Socratic elicitation paired with an output constraint: making the model ask before it writes keeps the scenario yours rather than generic, and requiring one fact per element gives you a fact pattern you can later test a complaint against instead of a story you have to take on faith.

Non-Existent Claim Prober

I am researching whether Florida law recognizes a civil cause of action that would let a court order a private defendant to issue a written apology to a plaintiff. Tell me plainly whether such a claim exists in Florida. If it does not, say so directly and do not soften it, and do not offer a related claim as though it were the same thing. If you believe any Florida statute, rule, or case supports such a claim, give me the full citation and tell me on a scale of high, medium, or low how confident you are that the authority exists and says what you claim. Then tell me what a Florida court would most likely do with a count seeking that relief, and what exposure the filing party could face under section 57.105 of the Florida Statutes. Assume I will verify every citation you give me on Google Scholar and the Florida Legislature’s site.

This is the responsible-use prompt, and it works by giving the model an opening to fabricate and then making that fabrication easy to catch. Models tend to be agreeable about claims a user seems to want to exist, so demanding a confidence rating and announcing that you will verify turns the hallucination risk into a diagnostic you can actually observe.

Case File Consistency Auditor

I am going to paste seven documents from a single fictional Florida negligence case: a fact pattern, a complaint, an answer, a motion to dismiss, a set of interrogatories, a notice, and a case management calendar. Do not rewrite them and do not comment on their quality. Your only job is to find internal inconsistencies across the set. Build a table with one row per problem, listing the documents involved, the conflicting language quoted exactly from each, and what the correct version probably should be. Check party names and their spelling, the case number and court name in every caption, all dates and whether they are consistent with each other, whether the answer responds to every numbered paragraph of the complaint, whether the affirmative defenses match the facts pleaded, and whether the calendar’s deadlines run from the dates the pleadings actually state. List the problems in the order you would fix them.

Narrowing the model to one job, cross-document consistency, is what makes this work; a general “review my documents” request produces style notes, while a constrained audit with a fixed table of checks produces the mechanical errors a human proofreader misses in a seven-document file.

Deadline Derivation Checker

I will paste the text of the Uniform Case Management Order attached to Seventh Judicial Circuit Administrative Order CV-2024-023-SC, along with the text of Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.200. Using only the text I provide, build a table of every deadline the order and the rule impose, with one column for the deadline, one for the trigger date the deadline runs from, one for the calculated calendar date based on a filing date of [insert your filing date], and one for the exact language in the source that imposes it. Where the order or the rule is silent on something I would expect to see, write “not specified” rather than filling the gap from your general knowledge. At the end, list separately any deadline you calculated where the counting method was ambiguous, and tell me which provision of Florida Rule of General Practice and Judicial Administration 2.514 I should read to resolve it.

Source grounding, with the model restricted to text you supply and told to write “not specified” instead of guessing. A model asked about court deadlines from memory will confidently produce plausible dates that belong to a different circuit or a superseded version of the rule, and the restriction is what stops that.