12 financial affidavits, one divorce, and the tool I wish I had

The Sunday night I started writing this software

It was a Sunday in February. The kitchen table was covered in paper. Three years of bank statements, pay stubs, two-page court orders with the wrong dollar figure on them, a laptop showing the same Illinois Supreme Court PDF I had filled out three times already. I was on affidavit number four. My hearing was Wednesday. I had been at the table since seven in the morning and the sun had gone down without me noticing. My oldest daughter walked through the kitchen, saw me, and turned back around without asking if I was okay. She already knew the answer.

I am a principal software engineer. I have shipped systems that move money. I have built reconciliation pipelines for retail chains that catch six-figure variances inside an hour. And I could not figure out the right number to put on line 14 of the Illinois 13.3.1 financial affidavit. Not because the math was hard. Because the math was hard while my hands were shaking.

The form is fourteen pages. It asks you to list your monthly income from every source, every deduction, every recurring expense from rent to streaming services to your kid's gymnastics tuition. It asks for the balance on every account, every debt, every asset, with a date stamp. Then it asks you to sign under penalty of perjury that the whole picture is accurate to the best of your knowledge. The form does not care that you are doing this on the worst weekend of your life. The form does not care that you have not slept right in eleven months. The form has its blanks and you fill them in.

I am not unique. Every parent in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will, McHenry, Winnebago, Sangamon, every county in this state has sat at a version of that kitchen table. The Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts reports tens of thousands of dissolution-of-marriage filings every year. Most of them include a 13.3.1. Most of those affidavits are filled out by hand, by someone who has never filled out a court form before, the night before it is due.

That is who Casefile is for. Not lawyers. The parent at the kitchen table.

Twelve affidavits, three years

Most divorces in Illinois that get to a final ruling produce two or three financial affidavits per side. The initial filing. An updated version when discovery closes. A final version if the case drags long enough that the numbers go stale. Mine produced twelve. Six on my side. Six on the other.

The reason was not malice on anyone's part. The reason was time. My case ran twenty-eight months from filing to final judgment. Inside those twenty-eight months, my income changed (consultancy income is lumpy). My housing changed (I moved twice). The child-support order changed (we re-baselined after the first year). Each change triggered an updated 13.3.1. Each updated 13.3.1 took me a full weekend to assemble. Twenty-eight months times two weekends a year equals roughly fourteen weekends of my life I gave to that one form. Not preparing my case. Not talking to my kids. Filling out the form.

My attorney did not do it for me. She read it, suggested edits, but the assembly was on me. That is not a complaint. Attorneys charge fifteen to twenty hours of paperwork prep on a contested case at three hundred dollars an hour. If I had asked her to do it twelve times, the legal fees alone would have crossed forty-five thousand dollars on the affidavit work. Most parents cannot write that check. I could not write that check. So the form falls on the parent.

The math problem is not actually that hard. The problem is that the form asks you to translate twelve bank statements and four pay stubs into eight summary numbers, and every translation step is a chance to make a transcription mistake. A wrong number on a 13.3.1 is not a typo. It is a sworn statement to the court. If opposing counsel catches it, your credibility takes a hit. If a judge catches it, your case takes a hit. By affidavit eight, I had developed a forty-step spreadsheet to catch my own typos. By affidavit ten, the spreadsheet had its own bugs.

The week I stopped writing spreadsheets

Affidavit twelve was filed in October 2025. The case closed three weeks later. The Monday after the final order, I opened my laptop and started writing what would become Casefile.

I knew the shape of it before I wrote the first line of code. There would be an upload area. You would drop in your bank statements, your pay stubs, your lease, your child-support order. The system would extract the actual numbers from the documents — not the numbers you remember, the numbers on the page. There would be a guided interview that walks you through the four sections of the 13.3.1 one decision at a time, with every dollar tied back to a source document. At the end, you would download a clean, court-ready PDF with every line populated, every figure provable, every supporting document attached.

No legal advice. No filing for you. No replacing your attorney. Just the assembly work, done.

The first prototype took six weekends to build. The reason it took six weekends, not twelve, is that I had spent fourteen weekends doing the work by hand, so I already knew exactly what every field needed. I had test data for free — three years of my own financial records, with the answers already known from twelve completed affidavits. Casefile got to be born with a ground-truth dataset that took me three of the worst years of my life to collect.

What I learned about the Illinois family-law system

Three things they do not tell you when you file.

One. The court is not on your side. It is not on the other side either. The court is on the side of process. If your paperwork is clean, complete, and submitted on time, the court will move you along. If your paperwork is sloppy, the court will reset hearings, ask for revisions, and let your case drift. The single biggest determinant of how long your case takes is the quality of your paperwork. Not the strength of your argument. The completeness of your forms.

Two. Your attorney's time is your money. Every hour a paralegal spends scanning your bank statements is your money. Every hour your attorney spends reconciling your bank statements against the affidavit you wrote is your money. Most parents pay between fifteen hundred and six thousand dollars on the front end of a case for paperwork prep alone. That is the line item your attorney's invoice calls "Document review and affidavit preparation." If you walk into the first meeting with a clean, complete 13.3.1 already done, that line item collapses by sixty to eighty percent.

Three. You will be asked to update your affidavit. Probably more than once. Under 750 ILCS 5/501 and Cook County Circuit Court Rule 13.3.1, an updated Financial Affidavit has to be served before any hearing where financial circumstances have materially changed. Contested cases refresh two or three times. Modification cases — when someone files later to change child support after the divorce is final — produce another 13.3.1 each time. The parent who treats the affidavit as a one-time task and throws away their working files ends up rebuilding the whole thing from scratch six months later. The parent who keeps the source documents and the working numbers in one organized place does the update in an hour.

Why Illinois only, and why for now

I am one person. I built Casefile in the evenings and the weekends. I picked Illinois because Illinois is the state I went through this in, the state I live in, the state where I know the judges and the local rules and the per-county quirks. The Illinois 13.3.1 became standardized in its current form in 2017. It is the most-used family-law financial disclosure form in the state and every divorcing parent who is asking the court for child support or maintenance fills one out.

Other states have their own forms. California has the FL-150. New York has the Statement of Net Worth. Texas has its own model income disclosure. Each one is structured differently. Each one has its own line items, its own per-county quirks, its own filing rules. Casefile could become a fifty-state product. It will not become a fifty-state product in 2026. The right pace is to nail Illinois first, earn the trust of Illinois family-law attorneys first, and then move to one more state when we can do it with the same depth. I am not going to ship a half-built California version to chase scale.

If you are outside Illinois and you found this page, you can leave your email on the homepage waitlist and tell me your state. I read every one. The state with the most waitlist signups is the state I build next.

What Casefile actually does

Plainly, with no marketing varnish.

You upload PDFs. Bank statements, pay stubs, leases, your most recent tax return, your child-support order if you have one. Casefile reads them. Every transaction in your bank statement gets categorized. Every pay-stub line gets parsed (gross, federal withholding, state withholding, FICA, health insurance, retirement, take-home). Your lease tells the form your monthly rent. Your child-support order tells the form your current obligation.

Then a guided interview asks you the eight or so business decisions the form actually requires you to make — primarily classification questions where only you know the right answer ("is this side-business income recurring or a one-time job?"). For each answer, the system shows you the source documents it is using to fill the form. Nothing on your 13.3.1 is a number you cannot point back to a document.

When you are done, you download a clean draft of the form and a ZIP file of all your supporting documents. You hand that ZIP to your attorney. Your attorney reviews the draft, makes any edits they want, and files. The whole arc — from "I have a folder of statements" to "I am handing my attorney a complete file" — takes about ninety minutes for a typical case. The first time. Updates take less.

Casefile is not a law firm. We do not represent you. We do not file anything in court. We do not tell you what to put on the form. We assemble what your documents already say, and we let you review and edit every number before you sign.

Your documents are encrypted with AES-256 the moment they arrive on our servers, before we write them to disk. The encryption keys live in a separate vault from the database, so a database leak by itself is unreadable. AI access to your documents is off by default and only on if you flip the toggle in your account. We will never sell your data and we will never train an AI on it. The security page walks every layer.

My promise

$147 one-time. No subscription. The first 100 founding customers pay $97 with code FOUNDING100. If Casefile does not save you the cost of one hour of your attorney's time, email me directly at [email protected] and I will refund you personally — the full $147. Not a chatbot. Me.

I am not running a venture-backed growth experiment. Casefile is a small, focused product run by one engineer who lived through what you are about to live through. The whole reason this exists is that I do not want any other parent at any other kitchen table to fill out affidavit number four with tears in their eyes. That is the entire mission. If it works, more parents try it. If it does not, I refund their money. There is no other plan.

Where to start

If you want to know how close you are to having everything you need to file, run the free Illinois 13.3.1 Readiness Score. It asks you about a dozen questions and gives you a percentage. No credit card. No email signup. Just an honest read on where you stand.

If you want the full assembly tool, start Casefile. $147 one-time, 30-day money-back guarantee. No subscription.

Either way, you do not have to do this the way I did.