How to format dates in Filevine DocGen (formats & ordinals)

Filevine DocGen · advanced guide

Dates in legal documents come in many shapes — 6/8/2026 on a cover letter, June 8, 2026 in a body paragraph, and formal ordinal datelines like "this 8th day of July, 2026" in a signature block. Filevine can produce all of them from the same underlying date, if you know how to format the field. Here's how.

How to format a Filevine date field

A Filevine date pulls in raw by default. To control how it prints, apply Word's date format switch (\@) to the field, using a format picture:

{ MERGEFIELD trialdate \@ "M/d/yyyy" }     → 6/8/2026
{ MERGEFIELD trialdate \@ "MM/dd/yyyy" }   → 06/08/2026
{ MERGEFIELD trialdate \@ "MMMM d, yyyy" } → June 8, 2026

The same technique works on any Filevine date field — date of birth, date of loss, incident date, trial date. You can also print a single component (just the month name, or just the year) by using only that part of the picture, e.g. \@ "MMMM" or \@ "yyyy".

Why a Filevine date field displays incorrectly

When a date prints in the wrong shape — or prints something that isn't a date at all — the cause is almost always one of these:

• No format switch at all. Without \@, the date arrives however Filevine stores it rather than how you want it read. This is the usual reason a date looks "raw."
• The format picture is case-wrong. Word's picture codes are case-sensitive in a way that surprises people: M is the month, m is the minute, and D is the day of the year while d is day of the month. A date showing a number in the 1–60 range where the month should be is nearly always mm where MM was meant.
• The switch was typed as plain text. The \@ "M/d/yyyy" has to live inside the Word field, not next to it. If you can select it like ordinary text, it isn't part of the field and won't apply.
• The Filevine field isn't a date field. A date typed into a free-text field is a string, and Word can't apply a date picture to a string — it will pass the text straight through. Check the field's type in Filevine rather than assuming.
• The field is empty for that project. A blank where a date should be is a data problem, not a formatting one. Confirm the project actually has the value before changing the picture.

How to insert today's date in Filevine DocGen

For datelines that should always read as the day the document is generated, don't map a Filevine field at all — use the built-in TODAY code. Filevine fills it with the generation date, and it takes the same \@ format switches:

{ TODAY \@ "MMMM d, yyyy" }  → the date the document is generated

How to create an ordinal date such as "the 8th day of July"

Formal language like "this 8th day of July, 2026" needs an ordinal suffix (st/nd/rd/th). Word's date switch has no built-in ordinal format, which is why this trips up so many templates. The reliable workaround is to assemble the dateline from parts — the native day number, month, and year — plus a small conditional field that computes the correct suffix from the day:

this { MERGEFIELD trialdate \@ "d" }{ IF { MERGEFIELD trialdate \@ "d" } >= 11
  { IF { MERGEFIELD trialdate \@ "d" } <= 13 "th"
  "{ IF ... 1→st, 2→nd, 3→rd, else th ... }" } "th" }
  day of { MERGEFIELD trialdate \@ "MMMM, yyyy" }

The nested logic handles the awkward cases correctly — 1st, 2nd, 3rd, but 11th/12th/13th (not 11st/12nd/13rd), and 21st/22nd/23rd. It works, but it's a lot of hand-built field code to get exactly right, and it has to be rebuilt for every ordinal date in the document.