Step one is your story. You tell us what happened, typed or spoken. If you record, you see the words before they are saved, so you can fix anything we heard wrong. Nothing is graded, nothing is filed, nothing is sent anywhere. Each update is added to your story with its date, and you can keep adding as things happen.
Step two is your paperwork. As papers arrive, a summons, a complaint, a notice, a letter from the other side, you add them to your case as PDFs or Word files. Each one is read and explained in plain English: what kind of paper it is, who is involved, which court, and the dates and amounts it mentions. Anything we are not sure of, we ask you to check.
Step three is your dates. When a paper gives a deadline, or when the court rules set one from the day you were served, it goes on your Deadlines page with how it was worked out, so a clerk could check it in a minute. Nothing counts as your deadline until you say yes to it. Where something is genuinely a judgment call for a lawyer, we say so and stop rather than guessing.
Step four, opening soon, is preparing a response. When an answer is due, it is assembled in the format your court expects, built only from what you have told us and what your papers say. Every law it cites is checked against our legal database first, and anything we could not check is left out. Preparing documents is part of your plan, with no fee per document.
Step five, with it, is filing it yourself. You read the document, change anything you want, and take it to your court. For California answers, you get step-by-step filing instructions covering the fee, how to ask for a fee waiver, and how the other side must be served. Your case stays yours afterwards, whatever happens.