Choosing Your Jurisdiction: What Changes in the Document

The jurisdiction control is the small octagonal button that sits on the homepage and on the drafting, compiler and reviewer pages. It looks like a preference, and in one sense it is: nothing happens the moment you press it. What it does is decide the jurisdiction every document you generate from that point will be built for, and the number of things that follow from it is larger than the control suggests.

This is a walkthrough of what actually moves.

Setting it

Open the switcher and pick one of five: the Islamabad Capital Territory, Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Balochistan. The choice follows your account rather than your browser, so setting it on a desktop and then opening the platform on a laptop gives you the same jurisdiction rather than a default. The label beside the wordmark tracks whatever is currently selected, which is the quickest way to check yourself before you submit something.

Below the High Court, a second control appears once you select a province: the district. It only exists for the provinces, because the Capital Territory is a single district and the field would be meaningless there.

What changes, in order

The court header and the cause title. The heading of the document is regenerated from the jurisdiction. A civil suit in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Balochistan is headed for the District Judge, and the district you typed appears in the venue rather than a hardcoded provincial capital. A writ is headed for that province's own High Court at its principal seat.

The forum a matter is routed to. This is the part that most often surprises people, because the forums are genuinely different rather than differently named. A rent matter goes to the Controller in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, under each province's own rent legislation, and the appeal route differs with it. In Balochistan, for example, an appeal under the rent Ordinance lies to the High Court and not to the District Judge, which is not what the equivalent route looks like elsewhere.

The governing statute the document pleads under. The drafting engine is given a list of the statutes it is permitted to cite for that template in that jurisdiction, and it is not given anything outside it. A Sindh matter is not offered the Capital Territory's list.

The options inside the form. This is the one worth reading carefully, because it is a change to what you are asked rather than to what is printed, and it is easy to click past. The grounds offered on an eviction petition are the grounds that jurisdiction's statute actually confers. The Islamabad Rent Restriction Ordinance 2001 provides bona fide personal need and the availability of alternative accommodation to the tenant. The Punjab Rented Premises Act 2009 provides neither. Its six grounds are expiry of the tenancy, non-payment within thirty days of the statutory period, breach of a term, violation of a statutory obligation of the tenant, use of the premises for a different purpose, and sub-letting without written consent. Select Punjab and those are the six you are offered, cited to their own section. Select Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Balochistan and you are offered the equivalent grounds without a section number, because the section has not been established from a primary source and a plausible citation is worse than none.

The filing estimate. The court fee figures shown beside the form are that jurisdiction's own. Where a province's schedule has been established from primary sources, you see it. Where it has not, the block does not appear at all. There is no Islamabad figure standing in, and no placeholder line, because a form widget with nothing true to say should not be on the page.

Review and compilation. The same selection reaches the Matter Reviewer and the Case Compiler, so a Punjab agreement is reviewed against Punjab law and a briefing describes the forum the matter is actually heading to.

What does not change

Federal law does not move, because it does not vary. Limitation periods come from the Limitation Act 1908 and apply identically across all five jurisdictions. The Penal Code, the Code of Civil Procedure, the Contract Act and the other federal instruments are federal wherever you are standing.

The case law database and the statute library do not narrow either. Both remain open in full regardless of the selection, because precedent from another High Court is worth reading even where it is persuasive rather than binding, and because a statute is worth reading whoever enacted it.

What greys out, and why it is telling you something

Select a province and a set of reference tools greys and stops responding: the stamp duty and court fee calculators, the courts and police station directories, the jurisdiction decoder, the practice rules, the bench composition and the process guides. Clicking one raises a short notice naming the tool and the jurisdiction you have selected.

These are Islamabad Capital Territory tools. They are administrative facts about a specific place rather than statute text, and each needs establishing from that province's own authorities before it can be published. The greying is not a paywall and it is not a bug. It is the platform declining to show you Islamabad's stamp duty schedule while you have Punjab selected.

One habit worth forming

Check the label beside the wordmark before you submit a document, in the same way you would check the cause title before you file. The switcher is a preference and it persists, which is convenient until the week you draft two matters in two provinces. The jurisdiction that governs the document is the one that was selected when you pressed generate, and it is printed in the header of what comes back.