Case and document software for UK family law practice
Numo Law runs a family matter from intake to final order across all three UK jurisdictions. It drafts every document the matter needs on the firm's own letterhead, gets it signed and served, and records that a named qualified person approved it. It is a tool for regulated professionals: it does not give legal advice and is not sold as a substitute for a lawyer.
01
Scottish family law values matrimonial property at the date of separation rather than the date of trial, and has no Form E. Northern Ireland runs on Orders in Council, so citing the Children Act 1989 there is an error of law. Numo Law holds three separate knowledge packs, fixes the jurisdiction at intake, and blocks the wrong jurisdiction's vocabulary from reaching a draft.
02
Money is held as integer pence, and every total, split and net equity figure is computed by a calculation engine that shows its workings. A schedule of assets going before a court is reproducible and checkable line by line. This is the largest professional indemnity exposure in financial remedy work, and it is engineered out rather than prompted around.
03
Research runs against eight official sources, each named with its publisher and the moment it was read: legislation.gov.uk, the National Archives' Find Case Law, the Scottish and Northern Irish judgment registers, the procedure rules and the courts' own publications. Every authority comes back graded, and a fabricated case is told apart from a real one the register simply does not cover, which is the mistake careless checking makes in the other direction. Unverified authority cannot enter a court-facing document.
04
Every date carries its source, its trigger, the rule it came from and how it was counted, over each jurisdiction's own bank holiday calendar. A date derived from a court order outranks any workflow estimate, and where the trigger itself is uncertain the engine refuses to present a number at all: it raises the deadline for review instead of quietly inventing a day.
05
A fee earner connects their own Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Chat, Dropbox or Calendly once. After that a file comes out of the drive straight into the matter, an email is drafted in Numo and leaves from their own mailbox, and a deadline becomes an entry in their own calendar. The OAuth tokens are sealed with XChaCha20-Poly1305 before they touch the database and the applications never read one, and every call through a connection writes an integration event.
06
There are ten kinds of action Numo can take in an account a person has connected, and each one is written down as a pending action with a plain-English summary of exactly what it would do. It runs when that person presses Allow, as them, and the fact is audited. Blanket permission is not a setting that exists: an assistant that can be talked into sending an email is a liability, so it cannot send one.
07
A review returns findings, and each one carries the passage it rests on. Before a finding reaches a fee earner its quotation is matched against the text of the document itself, and anything that does not match is dropped. The number dropped is shown rather than hidden, because a reviewer needs to know the machine threw something away as much as they need what it kept.
08
Intake searches every name across every matter in the firm, including the ones the person running the check is not allowed to open. Where they cannot see the matter, the result says a conflict exists and names the person responsible for it, and nothing else. A check that had to print the other client's name in order to report the clash would be its own breach.
09
Numo reads across everything filed on a matter and surfaces where two passages give a different date or a different sterling figure for the same thing. It is arithmetic and string matching, not a language model, and both sides are anchored to the file, the page and the sentence. It never says which one is right. That is the fee earner's judgement, and it arrives with the evidence already found.
10
Nine things that can happen to a matter and eleven things to do about them, wired up by the firm in advance and checked every five minutes on the server. A file arrives and is read, screened and summarised; a deadline comes inside seven days and the right person is told. It is a standing instruction the practice wrote itself, which is a different thing from software deciding to act.
11
Every matter names the authorised person responsible for it. Every output is watermarked as a draft until they sign it off, every action is classified before it can happen, and every approval is written immutably against the exact document version and the warnings that were shown. Nothing sends itself, and the safeguarding engine can suppress an outbound contact a user has already approved.
12
Each document takes a random content key that is never reused, wrapped by a vault key derived with Argon2id. Encryption is chunked and authenticated, so truncating a file or reordering it fails authentication rather than decrypting to something shorter. The filename and the media type live inside the protected payload, because a directory listing of a family case file is disclosive on its own.
13
Most of the market stops at a draft. Numo Law assembles the document from the firm's own adopted precedents, carries the firm's logo, regulatory footer, complaints wording and signature blocks, then takes it through electronic signature, witnessing where a deed requires it, secure delivery and a certificate of service. Numo never appears on a page a client or a court sees.
14
Matters, the people in them, the documents produced and the threads between matters, laid out from the database rather than from a model, and laid out deterministically so the same data always draws the same picture. The assistant reads the graph as data, which means an analysis of it can be checked against it.
15
Family matters carry special category data, criminal offense data and children's data, and firms are right to be nervous about uploading them. The desktop build keeps the case file on the firm's own machine, and the calculation, deadline, jurisdiction and drafting engines all run with no network. Only citation verification needs a connection, because it queries the official registers live.
One sign-in, per person, to the account they already use. The tokens are sealed before they touch the database and the applications never read one, so a connection grants the firm reach without handing anyone a key.
Gmail
Numo drafts the email and asks before it sends from your address. Replies and threads on a matter stay with the case file.
Google Drive
A statement, a bundle or a valuation brought into a matter, and the firm's own precedents and templates found to work from.
Google Docs
A letter or a statement drafted straight into a Doc, or the firm's own template copied and its placeholders filled.
Google Sheets
A schedule of assets or a disclosure tracker built as a Sheet, with every figure written exactly as computed, in integer pence.
Google Calendar
Court dates and internal targets in the fee earner's own calendar, each entry carrying the matter reference and how the date was computed.
Google Chat
A note to the team space when something needs a person: an approval waiting, a deadline inside seven days.
Dropbox
Files pulled from Dropbox into a matter, without leaving the case file to fetch them.
Calendly
The firm's own booking page offered to a client from inside their portal.
Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Dropbox and Calendly are trademarks of their owners. They are named here to say what Numo Law connects to, and nothing more.
We can build and run one of these for you.
Start a project
