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What are child protection court documents like? What are they made of and how are they made? What do these documents do to people? These are some questions explored in this thesis. The Children’s Court runs on documents and yet these important parts of the industry have hardly been studied. They are a stadium with stories competing and bullying to be the one taken most seriously. The main story of this thesis is what we find when we look at one set of court documents through the lens of narrative and hear what it’s like to be an author and a reader of those documents. At its heart, though, the thesis is about the consequences of documents and the ethics of authorship. The research found that the conditions for writing court documents are complex; that it is possible to identify the features of narrative in these documents and that parents often have strong reactions to the documents written about them. Additionally, the research found those who have more power in the system can and do take small actions to lessen the effects of documents. At the same time, the difference that these actions made is limited and writing documents in a way that reduces their consequences was not identified in the research – it remains an area to be developed. The data for this research was drawn from one care and protection matter in the Children’s Court in NSW, Australia; the court file was read and five people involved in that case were interviewed. The father of the subject child, the magistrate, a solicitor, a caseworker from the statutory child protection agency and her manager all participated in conversations with the researcher. Their knowledge of the documents and insights about the effects that documents can have provides a rich, new view that holds important lessons for professions in which writing is an integral part of its power.