Letterhead best practices in Filevine DocGen

Filevine DocGen · best practices

Letterhead is the first thing anyone sees on a firm's document, and it's also the thing most likely to go stale — a moved office, a new phone number, an attorney who changed their name. The goal is a letterhead that looks sharp in every format your documents end up in and stays correct without editing template after template. Here's how we recommend setting it up.

Start with a clean, high-resolution logo

Your logo has to survive two very different rendering engines: Word on screen, and the PDF your documents are usually delivered as. A logo that looks fine in Word can turn fuzzy or heavy once it's converted. Two rules keep it crisp everywhere:

• High quality. Use a vector logo (SVG or EPS) or a high-resolution PNG — aim for roughly 300 DPI at the size it actually prints. Low-resolution images that look acceptable on screen pixelate the moment they're scaled or flattened into a PDF.
• Simple. Fine gradients, drop shadows, thin hairlines, and tiny tagline text are exactly what degrade in conversion. A clean, high-contrast mark reproduces faithfully in Word, in PDF, and on a fax or a black-and-white printout.

Pull contact information from live org codes

Don't type your firm's name, address, and phone into the template. Map them to Filevine's organization codes so they're maintained in one place and every document stays current automatically:

{{orgName}}
{{orgAddress1Line1}}
{{orgAddress1Line2}}
{{orgAddress1City}}, {{orgAddress1State}} {{orgAddress1Zip}}
{{orgPhone1}}
{{orgFax1}}

These pull your firm's own contact details straight from Filevine's org record. Update them once and every template that uses them reflects the change — no reopening documents. An Org Admin manages these under Main Menu → Setup → Org (fax and text numbers live in the Org Phone Numbers advanced tool).

Make names update themselves too

Attorney and firm names change — a marriage, a partner added to the masthead, a rebrand. If those names are typed into the letterhead, every change means hunting through templates. Instead, keep them on the org record and reference them with org-level codes, the same family as {{orgName}}:

{{orgName}}
Attorneys at Law
{{orgAddress1Line1}}
{{orgAddress1City}}, {{orgAddress1State}} {{orgAddress1Zip}}

When an attorney changes their name, you edit it once on the org record and it flows to every document — nothing in the template itself has to change. Your project's DocGen Field List shows the exact org codes available to you; pick the one that matches the name you want to display.

The alternative: a hosted header image

Some firms would rather ship a pixel-perfect, designed letterhead than rebuild it from text and codes. In that case, embed a single high-quality header image — your fully designed letterhead, logo and firm details together — in the document header. It guarantees the layout looks exactly as designed in every document.

The tradeoff is that an image is static: because the contact details are baked into the artwork, a new address or phone number means re-exporting the image and re-placing it, rather than editing one org field. It's the right call when brand precision matters most and firm details rarely change — and the same logo rules apply doubly here, since the whole letterhead now depends on that one image rendering cleanly in both Word and PDF.