Playbook · Court prep

Documentation that survives a hearing.

Most pro-se litigants and even many represented clients walk into hearings with a phone full of screenshots and no narrative. This is how to build a record that a judge will actually read in the thirty seconds they're going to give it.

12 min read · By the Compass team

Why your screenshots aren't enough

Eight months into a custody case, the average parent has somewhere between 200 and 1,400 screenshots in their phone. None of it is organized. None of it is dated in the way a judge needs. None of it has the context a stranger would need to understand what they're looking at.

Screenshots are raw material. They are not documentation. The job of documentation is to take that raw material and turn it into a story a busy judge can absorb in thirty seconds and trust.

The four-column log

Every parent in a contentious case should be keeping a running log. Four columns. That's it.

  1. Date and time — exact, with timezone if relevant
  2. What happened — one sentence, factual, no editorializing
  3. Source — where the evidence lives (text screenshot, email, OFW message ID, witness present)
  4. Why it matters — one phrase tying it to the issue (e.g., "missed exchange," "violation of paragraph 4.b," "alienating language to child")

This is not a journal. It is not a place to vent. It is a deliberately boring document because boring documents are the ones that get used. If you find yourself writing two paragraphs about how it made you feel, you are writing something else. Stop. Open a different document for that.

Screenshot discipline

Three rules for screenshots that hold up:

  1. Capture the timestamp. Your phone OS shows the time on the message — make sure it's in the screenshot. If it isn't, the screenshot is significantly weaker.
  2. Capture the sender name. Same principle. The screenshot needs to show, on its face, who sent the message.
  3. Capture context. One message in isolation rarely tells the story. Two or three messages above and below tell the judge whether a reply was reasonable in context.

Save screenshots to a single folder, named with the date in YYYY-MM-DD format so they sort chronologically. Do not rely on iCloud Photos to organize this for you.

Naming conventions that scale

By month nine of a contentious case you will have hundreds of files. Future you needs to find any one of them in under a minute. The naming convention that works:

YYYY-MM-DD_short-description.png

Example: 2026-03-14_late-pickup-text.png

Boring beats clever every time. Date first means files sort themselves. Lowercase and hyphens means it works on every operating system and every email attachment system.

Three things to never put in your documentation

  1. Speculation about diagnoses. Even if your ex obviously fits a personality pattern, a log entry that says "NPD behavior again" is not evidence — it's an opinion you're not qualified to make. Describe the behavior, not the diagnosis.
  2. Information you got from the kids. Anything starting with "the kids told me" is hearsay and creates a parental-alienation flag for opposing counsel. Document direct observations only.
  3. Anything that reads as venting. If a stranger reading the document would think you're upset, the document loses credibility. Save the venting for therapy, friends, or a journal nobody will subpoena.

What to bring to court (or to your attorney)

For a hearing, your attorney will tell you exactly what they want. For a meeting with an attorney, or for pro-se hearing prep, the document set is:

  1. The four-column log — the boring chronology
  2. The exhibit binder — printed screenshots, in date order, with a one-line caption under each
  3. A one-page summary — five to seven sentences explaining the pattern
  4. A list of specific incidents tied to specific paragraphs of your existing order or proposed modification

Note what's not in that list: anger, color commentary, your feelings about your ex's behavior, character assessments. Strip every one of those out before you walk in.

Related: The BIFF reply · What judges actually read