Dynamic date fields 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.

Formatting a 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".

Today's date, automatically

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

The hard part: ordinal datelines

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.