Onboarding is optional: what Petria drafts against if you skip it

Voice samples are not a prerequisite. A pro se filer, a brand-new firm still deciding whether Petria fits, or anyone who just wants to see a real job run can skip the onboarding upload step entirely: a Skip for now option sits beside Analyze on the setup screen and goes straight to your matter workspace. Nothing in the product blocks this, and it is a real, intended path rather than an edge case.

Here is what actually happens on Standard and Pro when you skip it. Every draft job loads the standard researched section template for the petition type and jurisdiction, the house structure every firm's drafts are grounded in. On top of that, Petria layers a learned voice overlay built from your uploaded samples, covering tone, structure emphasis, and which arguments you tend to lead with. With zero samples, there is a house voice too: drafting falls back to Petria's own default professional writing style rather than leaving the section unstyled. The job runs exactly the same way, against exactly the same template, with no firm-specific voice layered on top of that default yet. You are not getting a degraded draft; you are getting the same starting point every firm drafts from before their own voice is learned in. You can add samples at any point afterward, and jobs from then on pick up the voice on that lane.

Enterprise works differently by default, though not as strictly as it used to. Enterprise firms are meant to draft against an approved custom structure rather than the standard template, checked per petition type and jurisdiction: if your firm is on Enterprise and has not uploaded samples, run Analyze, and had a partner approve the resulting structure for a given type, draft jobs of that type fail outright by default, with a message telling you to complete setup, rather than quietly falling back to the standard template the way Standard and Pro do. That default exists because the whole point of the tier is that every job runs against the outline your partners actually signed off on, not a generic one.

But an Enterprise firm is not locked into that if it decides the custom outline is not worth setting up, at least not yet. The same Skip for now control on the setup screen lets an Enterprise firm explicitly opt into the house template and house voice too, the same default Standard and Pro get automatically. It is a deliberate choice, not a silent fallback: a firm mid-onboarding that simply has not finished yet still gets the strict block, so an incomplete setup never quietly ships against the wrong outline by accident. Only clicking Skip for now opts a firm out of that block. And it is not a one-way door: approve a real structure for any petition type later and it takes over immediately, opt-in or not.

The structure check, strict or opted out of, is scoped narrowly. It runs per petition type and jurisdiction, not firm-wide, so an Enterprise firm can onboard one lane at a time regardless of which path it takes. Approve EB-1A first and start running those jobs while NIW or O-1A stay on the house default; only the types you actually care to customize need the extra setup.

The practical rule: skip onboarding freely if you are Standard or Pro, still evaluating the product, or an Enterprise firm that decides the house template is good enough for a given petition type. If you want the real value of Enterprise (drafts that follow your partners' actual outline), plan to complete structure setup for each petition type you care about, one lane at a time rather than all at once, whenever you get to it.