Your First Task in Eve

Last updated: September 29, 2026

From an empty account to your first working matter.

Picking Your First Task

You don't need a plan for your whole caseload to get started. The easiest way in is the same for every firm, regardless of practice area or which Eve features you'll eventually use most: create a matter, and put files in it.

Everything Eve does for your clients, medical chronologies, drafting, chat, happens inside a matter, against files that live there. So rather than picking an advanced feature to try first, build the foundation the rest of it sits on.

None of this is permanent. A practice conversation can be deleted and a file uploaded to the wrong place can be removed, so the first one doesn't have to be perfect.

Step 1: Create a Matter

  1. From your homepage, click New Matter at the top of the screen.

  2. Give the matter a name that matches how you'd naturally refer to the case. Most firms use something like Client Name - Case Type, for example "Ramirez - MVA."

  3. Add a case number if that's part of your firm's convention. Not required, but it makes the matters list easier to search later.

Name matters the way you'd search for them later. Future-you, searching in a hurry, will thank present-you.

Step 2: Upload a File

Drag and drop a file, or a few, directly into the matter. Anything relevant to the case works: a client intake form, a police report, a set of medical records, correspondence, whatever's on hand.

Upload folders rather than loose files where you can. Eve keeps the folder structure exactly as it sits on your drive or in your document management system, so the file list in Eve looks like the one you're used to.

Eve accepts:

  • PDFs, Word documents, and plain text files

  • Excel and CSV files. Eve reads the values, not formulas or macros.

  • Images (JPEG, PNG). Scanned notes, screenshots, photographed documents. Eve reads the text in them.

  • Audio (WAV, MP3) and video (MP4, MOV). Eve transcribes the audio track and indexes the transcript. Video's visual content isn't analyzed, so a clip with no speech in it has nothing for Eve to read.

  • Email files (.eml, .msg), with attachments and metadata preserved.

Two things Eve can't open: password-protected files, and native Google Docs. Use File → Download in Google Docs to save as .doc or .docx first and it uploads normally. Zip files need to be extracted into a regular folder before upload.

Limits worth knowing: PDFs up to 10,000 pages, Word documents up to 2,000 pages, 1,000 files and 5GB per upload, and 20,000 files total per matter. The full table, including per-file size caps by type, is in 📄 Supported File Types and Size Limits in Eve

Step 3: Confirm It Landed

Give Eve a moment to process the upload. Once it's done, your files are listed on the left side of the matter. Click into one to open and read it natively inside Eve.

Expand the folders and confirm everything landed, especially on a large batch. If a file failed, a small red flag appears next to the document's title. Re-upload that one on its own; if it fails again, check it against the size limits and confirm it isn't password protected.

Ninety seconds here saves an afternoon of wondering why Eve doesn't know about a deposition.

That's it. You have a real, working matter with files Eve can reference, the same starting point every task in Eve builds from.

What's Next?

Where you go from here depends on the case and what you're trying to get done. A few common next moves:

If you do one thing this week: create a matter on a case you know inside out, upload the file you know best, and ask Eve one question about it.