The Applicant Attorney User Guide

The AI does the homework. You make the decisions.

Adjudica is your firm's AI-powered case management platform for California Workers' Compensation. This guide is written for applicant-side firms: attorneys and staff who represent injured workers. Upload your case documents and the AI reads them, fills your DWC forms, builds the treatment timeline, drafts your demand and settlement correspondence, and answers questions about the file, citing the exact document and page every time. Not a "read the whole manual" person? Jump to the Quick Reference and dive in.

What Adjudica Does for Applicant Firms

Adjudica is the system of record for an applicant practice. Your matters, documents, drafts, deadlines, and AI work product live in one workspace, and your home screen ranks the caseload by what actually needs you today.

You are always in charge. The AI proposes. You review, correct, and approve. Nothing leaves the platform without an attorney's sign-off. Think of it as a very fast, very thorough first-year associate who always shows their work and never files anything on their own.

The Glass Box promise. Every AI answer comes with a citation to the exact document and paragraph the AI relied on. You can always see why the AI said what it said, where it got the information, and how confident it is. Transparency is not a feature. It is the whole point.

Security. HIPAA compliant, with a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) in place. All data is encrypted at rest and in transit and hosted in US-based, BAA-covered cloud data centers. Your firm's data is isolated from every other firm's: no shared models, no training on your documents, ever. Protected Health Information is never routed through any AI model that is not covered by a signed BAA.

Quick Reference

Hover over any sidebar item for a tooltip explaining what it does.

Logging In & Navigation

Go to app.adjudica.ai and enter your email and password. First time with an invitation? Click the link in your invitation email, set a password, and you are in. First person from your firm? You will set up a firm profile, invite your team, and accept the BAA, about two minutes. New accounts require email verification before first access.

The left sidebar is your home base, and it adapts to your role, showing only the surfaces your permissions allow: Home, Mailroom, Documents, Drafts, Timeline, Matters, Templates, Workflows, Tools, and Settings (Admin only). Your profile lives at the bottom.

Your Applicant Home

Your home page is not an alphabetical list. It is a caseload ranked by what needs attention today, so it answers "what should I work on next?" before you ask.

• Four KPI tiles at a glance: Active Cases, Need Attention Now, Drafts Pending Review, and Settlement Pipeline value.
• The Hot List surfaces the matters that need you most, each with a plain-language reason it is ranked where it is. There are no mystery scores.
• Today / This Week tracks the statute-of-limitations deadlines an applicant practice cannot afford to miss.
• The Inbox routes you straight to drafts awaiting your review and to mailroom documents waiting to be classified.

The dashboard is not trying to show you everything. It shows you what needs your attention right now. If nothing is on it, your inbox is clear. An activity panel shows background work in progress (blue), finished (green), or needing attention (red); click any item to jump to the relevant page.

Matters

A matter is a case, one per injured worker, per date of injury. Open a matter and you get a single workspace: parties, injury and insurance details, documents, drafts, the case chat, the timeline, and the knowledge graph.

Create a matter. Matters, "New Matter", then fill in the applicant name, case number, employer, date of injury, and claim type. You can also open a case from a stack of paper: drag the pleadings into a new matter and the AI reads the actual documents, extracts the parties, employer, injury, and dates, and stands up the matter pre-filled. The most tedious part of intake becomes a review-and-confirm step.

Find a matter. The list is searchable and filterable by applicant name, case number, or employer; by assigned attorney; by status (Intake, Active, Pending Settlement, Settled, Archived); and by date range.

Migrating from MerusCase. The integration is a one-way migration bridge. During onboarding, connect your MerusCase account and Adjudica imports your existing cases and their documents. The practice then runs on Adjudica, not alongside a legacy tool.

Mailroom & Documents

Every document starts in the Mailroom, a transparency-first intake pipeline that shows exactly where each file is and why. Drag and drop your files, assign each to a matter, and click Upload. Supported formats include PDF, DOCX, JPG, PNG, WEBP, TXT, and Outlook .msg, up to 500 MB per file. PDFs give the best results by a wide margin.

Documents move through three legible lanes: Needs Review (the AI has read and classified it, your turn to approve), Exceptions (something went wrong, with an attorney-friendly label, never a raw error code), and Cleared (reviewed and dispositioned). Nothing is processed silently.

The firm-wide Documents library shows every case file across every matter, searchable and filterable. Before any AI-extracted text is trusted, an attorney reviews and corrects it side by side with the source page. Each paragraph carries a confidence score that measures legibility, not legal accuracy: it tells you how well the AI could read the page, not whether the content is legally correct. Skim the high-confidence paragraphs and spend your time where the AI struggled. Your approved version becomes the official extracted text the AI uses for form filling, timeline building, and chat.

Drafts

This is where documents get made, and it is the core of the platform. Three paths, one goal: get your documents done faster without sacrificing accuracy.

Court Form drafts save the most time. Open your matter, create a Court Form draft, pick a DWC form, and click "Re-fill Form With AI." In two to four minutes the AI reads every document in the matter and fills each field: high-confidence answers are pre-filled, anything it is unsure about is flagged with a warning icon and a dropdown of candidate answers, and fields it cannot answer from the record are left blank for you to complete. Every proposed answer links to the exact document and paragraph it relied on, so if an answer looks suspicious you click the citation, and if the source does not support it you override it. Form filling runs on Google's Gemini models; claimant PHI is never routed through OpenAI. A pre-filled answer does not mean it is correct. It means the AI thinks it is correct, and your job is to verify.

Template drafts fill a firm template (a demand letter, an MSC statement, client correspondence) with the matter's case data. The AI does a good job with factual placeholders; narrative sections may need your voice and strategy. Custom drafts generate a one-off document from a plain-language description, grounded in your uploaded files. If you write the same custom draft repeatedly, turn it into a template.

All drafts open in the same editor: auto-save, "Refine with AI" on any selected block, PDF preview, export to PDF or Word, and Publish to lock and version the final. Always download and review the final PDF before filing, and run the pre-filing checklist: every field checked against its source, every red or blank field completed, dates and constrained fields correct, and a licensed California attorney's review and approval.

Timeline

Upload your case documents and the AI builds a chronological timeline, with no manual data entry. It reads everything, finds dates paired with events, and plots them in order with descriptions, categories, and citations back to the source. For applicant work, the treatment timeline is often the backbone of MSC prep and settlement valuation.

Four color-coded categories let you scan the history at a glance: Legal, Medical, Insurance, and Communication. If three documents mention the same hearing on the same date, you get one entry with three citations, not three duplicates. Click any event for the full description and source links, and add or edit events manually for things not in your documents, such as phone calls or verbal agreements. The timeline is only as complete as your uploaded documents, so upload everything first.

Case Chat

Ask questions about your case in plain English. Click the sparkles icon on any matter page, type your question, and get an answer with links to the exact paragraphs the AI relied on. It is like a research clerk who has read every page of every file and can find anything in seconds.

Good questions are specific: "What does Dr. Johnson's QME report say about work restrictions?" or "Which document mentions the average weekly wage?" Case Chat will not give legal advice ("Should I take this settlement offer?" is your call), it only reads your uploaded documents (not external legal databases), and it does not know anything that is not in an uploaded document. Each session starts fresh, a deliberate choice that prevents the AI from carrying forward misunderstandings. Always verify citations.

Case Intelligence

As documents flow through the pipeline, the AI builds a knowledge graph: a structured map of every person, organization, body part, claim, treatment, and relationship it finds across your case files. Open it from the Case Intelligence button in the matter header.

Four tabs let you see and steer it. Overview shows a maturity bar and coverage metric for how much the AI has learned. Entities lists everything the AI extracted, each with a confidence badge from GOLD (human-verified and locked) down to NONE. Relationships shows the connections between entities, with a strength and corroboration count. Attention Required is your action queue for date conflicts, merge candidates, and low-coverage areas. When documents disagree, the AI flags the conflict for your review instead of guessing, and every resolution is recorded in the audit trail. The AI builds the map; you verify the territory.

Templates & Workflows

Templates let you build reusable documents (demand letters, settlement proposals, client correspondence) with smart placeholders that auto-fill from case data. Build a template from a sample, from scratch, or from an existing document, then use it on any matter. A starter set ships for common WC documents, and you can clone any of them and make it yours.

Workflows state a rule in plain English: when a case condition is met, generate a draft and route it for human approval. For example, when a new medical report uploads, automatically generate a Medical Summary draft, pre-filled and ready for review. You set the trigger and the action, then enable it. The workflow creates the draft, but a human still reviews it. Automation handles the initiation; quality control is still yours.

Administration & Security

Firm administration is visible only to the Admin role. Admins edit firm details, invite team members and assign each a single role, and manage integrations. Capabilities are membership-driven and enforced across the whole app:

A per-matter deny-list keeps sensitive cases in a smaller circle, and it also controls the AI's view of the matter, creating a real data-isolation boundary. On your own profile, keep your California Bar number current (it flows into generated documents) and enable two-factor authentication: it takes thirty seconds and is required for the most privileged roles.

When to Override the AI

The AI is a tool, not an authority. Always override its suggestions when you have information the AI does not (verbal conversations, privileged strategy, settlement terms discussed off the record); when the case has unusual facts that a pattern-matcher can get technically-sourced-but-strategically-wrong; when a citation does not support the answer; and when legal strategy requires framing the facts differently. When in doubt, your professional judgment always wins. The AI does not have a law license. You do. The pattern is simple: trust the AI to find information, and trust yourself to interpret it.

Support

Hours are Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Pacific, with security monitored 24/7. Defending employers or carriers instead? See the Defense Attorney User Guide.

The AI does the homework. You make the decisions. That is how it should be.