Create your first matter

A matter is one client case: one beneficiary or applicant, one petition or application type, one jurisdiction. A job is one run through the pipeline against that matter, and a single matter can have many jobs over its life: the original full draft job, later an RFE or RFR response job if a notice arrives, and on Enterprise the occasional section regeneration when something needs a targeted rewrite. Matters do not expire and are not consumed by running a job; only draft and response jobs draw down your firm's monthly quota.

Choose the petition or application type that matches the work at creation, since that choice locks in which researched template the draft grounds against and which fields the matter form asks for next. If you are unsure between two closely related types, pick the closest one and flag the gap in your internal review. Changing the type after exhibits and jobs exist is not a simple edit, so it is worth getting right at creation rather than fixing it later. On US matters, filing mode (who the petitioner is, and whether counsel is on the record) is set here too where the petition type supports it, and it changes what prints on the cover and how the closing signature block reads.

On Canadian matters, set the working language (English or French) before you upload exhibits. It governs which language drafting prompts and Word deliverables use, and Petria detects each exhibit's own language and translates or preserves it against that working-language choice during evidence normalization. Setting it after exhibits are already uploaded still works, but exhibits normalized under the old language need to be renormalized, so it is simpler to set it first.

Have your first batch of exhibits ready when you submit the job, labeled with your firm's exhibit convention and a one-line description of what each one is and which claim it supports. You can add more exhibits later and rerun, but a clean, labeled first upload is what keeps extraction and citation verification accurate on the first pass. A job run against a thin or unlabeled exhibit set produces a thinner draft and a noisier verification report, not a better one that somehow compensates for missing evidence.

Each matter also gets a matter reference in a petition-code-plus-number format, for example NIW-00463, which combines with the beneficiary name to form the display label in the workspace and the base of every deliverable file name. You can replace the generated reference with your firm's own numbering convention if you have one. Whatever you set is what your associates see in their downloads folder, so agree on a convention early if your firm runs matters across several petition types.