We're excited to announce the release of Divorcepath's new browser-based document editor. This is a purpose-built tool for editing court forms and legal documents directly in your web browser, with no software installation required. It's designed specifically for the documents that family law practitioners and self-represented litigants work with every day.
Why We Built a Document Editor
Family law involves a significant amount of paperwork. Financial statements, support applications, property schedules, and separation agreements all require careful preparation. Until now, the typical workflow involved downloading a court form template, opening it in Microsoft Word, manually entering data, cross-referencing your support calculations, and hoping the formatting survived the process.
We wanted to eliminate as many of those steps as possible. The new document editor lets you open, edit, and complete court forms directly on Divorcepath, with your calculation data automatically populated into the right fields.
Key Features
Merge Fields
The editor supports merge fields that connect directly to your Divorcepath calculations. When you open a court form, fields like party names, income amounts, support figures, and dates can be pre-populated from your existing case data. This eliminates manual data entry and reduces transcription errors.
Merge fields are clearly marked in the document so you can see exactly which values have been filled in and override them if needed.
Automatic Calculations
Financial statements require extensive arithmetic — totalling income categories, summing monthly expenses, calculating net property values. The editor handles these calculations automatically. When you enter an expense amount, the subtotals and totals update in real time. This is particularly valuable for forms like Ontario's Form 13.1, which has dozens of calculated fields across multiple schedules.
WYSIWYG Editing
The editor renders documents with high fidelity to how they will appear when printed. What you see on screen is what you'll get on paper. You can edit text, adjust entries, and review the final layout without switching between applications.
No Installation Required
Everything runs in your web browser. There's no plugin to install, no desktop application to maintain, and no compatibility issues across operating systems. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and on modern tablets.
Calculate child support, spousal support, and property division in minutes.
How It Works Under the Hood
Rather than relying on an existing office suite or embedding a third-party component, we built a custom document rendering engine from the ground up. The engine parses DOCX files — the format used by Canadian courts for editable templates — and renders them using a layout pipeline that handles pagination, table layout, headers and footers, fonts, and styling.
The rendering engine is written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, which means it runs at near-native speed inside the browser. A typical court form loads and renders in under a second, and editing operations feel instantaneous.
This approach gives us complete control over the rendering pipeline, which is essential for supporting the specific features that legal documents require — precise table layouts, content controls for form fields, and pixel-accurate pagination.
Supported Documents
At launch, the editor supports Ontario court forms, including the commonly used financial statements, support applications, and property forms. We're expanding coverage to additional provinces and document types on an ongoing basis.
The editor can also open any standard DOCX file, so you can use it with your own firm templates and custom documents. Merge field support works with documents that use standard content controls, which is the same mechanism used by most legal document automation systems.
Integration With Divorcepath Calculators
The document editor is tightly integrated with our child support and spousal support calculators. When you generate a court form from a calculation, the editor opens with all available data pre-filled. If you update your calculation, you can refresh the document to pull in the new values.
This workflow is especially powerful for financial statements, where income figures, tax calculations, and support amounts all need to be consistent. Instead of manually transferring numbers between a calculator and a form, the integration ensures everything stays in sync.
For Law Firms
Firms using Divorcepath Professional can use the editor as part of their document preparation workflow. Open a court form, review the pre-populated data, make any necessary adjustments, and export the finished document as a PDF or DOCX file ready for filing.
Because the editor runs in the browser, there are no per-seat licences to manage and no IT infrastructure to maintain. Any team member with a Divorcepath account can access the editor from any device.
For Self-Represented Litigants
If you're preparing your own court documents, the editor simplifies what can be an intimidating process. The merge field integration means you don't need to know which numbers go in which boxes — the system handles that for you. The automatic calculations mean you don't need to worry about arithmetic errors. And the WYSIWYG display means you can see exactly what the court will receive.
Getting Started
The document editor is available now for all Divorcepath users. You can access it by navigating to any supported court form in your case file, or by uploading a DOCX document directly. Visit our help centre for detailed guides on using the editor with specific court forms.
We'll be publishing additional how-to guides for specific forms in the coming weeks, starting with Ontario Form 13.1. If you have feedback or feature requests, please let us know.
