Deadlines and docketing
Explicit and calculated deadlines, deadline rules and court calendars, the attorney verification gate, internal buffers and at-risk deadlines.
For: AttorneyStaff
On this page
Deadlines are the part of a law practice where a mistake costs the most. LegalBook treats them accordingly: a deadline is never trusted until an attorney verifies it, never deleted, and never silently changed.
Where deadlines come from
- Explicit: entered from a notice, a court order or an agency, with the date as written.
- Calculated: derived from a published deadline rule, for example a number of days after a notice date, using a jurisdiction calendar's closed days and holidays.
- Workflow and buffers: internal target dates set ahead of the legal deadline.
Every calculated deadline keeps its derivation: the anchor date, the rule, each step and the calendar used.
The verification gate
A new deadline is proposed. It becomes verified only when someone with deadline-verification permission and an attorney role verifies it. A paralegal can verify only if the firm turns that on, and never publishes rules.
A deadline then moves through verified, active and satisfied. It can be superseded or cancelled, never deleted.
- A date is never edited in place. A corrected date is a new deadline that supersedes the old one, and the old one is kept.
- Weekends and holidays are not rolled automatically. By default an attorney verifies the roll.
- Cancelling a verified or active deadline is privileged: it needs deadline-cancel permission, a reason of at least 20 characters, cannot be done by a support session acting for someone else, and a firm owner who is not an attorney must acknowledge the legal risk.
The docketing queue
Docketing queue (Production and Attorney workspaces) is where deadlines and agency appointments are checked. Its buckets: proposed deadlines, unverified appointments, roll pending, stale derivations, at risk, and closed matters with open deadlines.
People with verification permission verify here. Others work in watch mode: they triage, take the task and ask an attorney, with Needs an attorney — assign in place of the verify buttons.
The deadline board
Deadlines (Attorney and Firm workspaces) is the attorney's exception-first list, with tabs At risk, Overdue, Next 14 days, Unverified, Stale and All. A row's menu offers Verify, Satisfy, Supersede, Cancel and Open matter. The detail drawer shows the deadline's history, changes, derivation, prerequisites and countdown.
Deadline rules and calendars
Deadline rules live in Configuration → Deadline rules. LegalBook ships no legal content: jurisdiction calendars ship with no holidays, and pack deadline rules ship as unpublished drafts with an offset of zero. A firm clones a rule and an attorney publishes it, with a statement that they are licensed to do so.
Buffers and at-risk deadlines
By default the firm sets internal buffer dates five days ahead of each legal deadline. LegalBook counts down to each deadline, checks its prerequisites (work items, document requests, client tasks, filings, appointments, attorney decisions, signatures) and marks it at risk when they are not on track. At-risk deadlines appear on the attorney home.
From a notice to a satisfied deadline
- A notice is verified in the correspondence queue and a deadline is proposed.
- An attorney verifies the deadline. The notice it came from stays linked.
- The workflow for the notice (for example RFE / NOID response) runs against it.
- When the response is filed with proof, the deadline is satisfied.