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 party name given one way in the complaint and another way in the answer is a defect any reviewer 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. Because Rule 1.110(b) treats every complaint as praying for general relief, a count survives the motion if its facts support any remedy, even one it never demanded. Under section 57.105 of the Florida Statutes, a lawyer who files a claim with no support in then-existing law risks paying the other side’s attorney’s fees, so no lawyer should file your second count.

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, at what address, on what date, and by what method. Under Florida Rule of General Practice and Judicial Administration 2.516(b), a document filed through the statewide e-filing portal must be served through the portal unless the parties agree otherwise. A document that requires a certificate and lacks one is incomplete on its face.

Standard Form Interrogatories

Interrogatory forms the Florida Supreme Court has approved for particular categories of cases, printed in Appendix I at the end of the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure. When a form exists for the type of action, Rule 1.340(a) requires a party’s initial interrogatories on any subject it covers to come from the form. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 33 has no such requirement, so a model drafting from federal habits may write a set from scratch that is improper even when every question in it is sensible.

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 your deadlines come from it. The parties may extend its disclosure and discovery deadlines by agreed order, but every other date holds unless the court changes it.

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. A model asked to support a deliberately baseless count may 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 and specific dates. Ask for 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 activity: 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. You will calculate deadlines from them later, and changing one 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). The complaint needs 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, relief no Florida cause of action provides. Plead it anyway, in proper form, because the point of this project is to see whether you can tell a claim defective in form from one defective in law. Leave Count I’s negligence paragraphs out of it. A count that re-alleges those facts states a negligence claim whatever it demands, and your motion in Part 3 needs a count that rests on the apology alone. 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. It also 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). The argument is that Florida law recognizes no claim for a compelled written apology, so the facts pleaded in that count entitle the plaintiff to no relief at all. 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. Your file holds both this motion and the answer, so date them in the order the rule requires and put the answer’s due date in your Part 5 calendar. 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 Appendix I at the end of Chapter 1 and find out whether the Florida Supreme Court has approved a standard interrogatory form for a negligence action of this kind. Where a form exists, Rule 1.340(a) requires a party’s initial interrogatories on the subjects it covers to come from it. A model drafting from federal habits may write its own set instead, which makes this 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. 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. Amendments that took effect January 1, 2025, 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 Exhibit A, the Uniform Case Management Order attached to it. 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. The order’s deadlines do not all run from one date: some count forward from the filing or from service, and others count back from events near trial. For each deadline, identify the date it runs from and state in the calendar which date you chose and why. Derive each one 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. 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. For the note, assume the parties are citizens of different states and more than $75,000 is at stake, since that is how a state-law negligence claim usually reaches federal court. Address the pleading standard your complaint would have to meet, the defendant’s deadline to respond, and the rule number the motion to dismiss would cite. Then cover 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. Use 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. It might be 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. Put them 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

Socratic elicitation makes the model ask three questions before it writes, which keeps the scenario yours rather than generic. The output constraint, at least one fact per element, gives you a fact pattern you can test a complaint against instead of a story you take on faith.

Non-Existent Claim Prober

The prompt builds in a hallucination check: it gives the model an opening to fabricate, then makes any fabrication easy to catch. Because models tend to go along with claims a user seems to want to exist, the confidence rating and your promise to verify turn that risk into a diagnostic you can observe.

Case File Consistency Auditor

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

Deadline Derivation Checker

From memory, a model asked about court deadlines can produce plausible dates that belong to another circuit or a superseded version of the rule. Source grounding guards against that: the model works only from the text you paste, and it writes “not specified” instead of guessing.