Deadlines: capabilities and limits

Where a date comes from

• The model reads the trigger, never the clock

  A model extracts only the event that starts a clock, its date appearing verbatim in the document. The rule identifier comes from a closed list, a low-confidence read is dropped, and unparseable output returns nothing. The text is wrapped as data, forged markers stripped.

• When and how the paper crossed, kept as a fact

  The crossing is stored against the document: direction, day, method, proof, quote and page. One served set runs three clocks off that fact; a corrected proof is one row; entry by the court is its direction, taking no service extension. The trigger is never retyped.

• The forum is resolved, never read off a column

  A matter's jurisdiction field is free text: Nevada, NV, USDC SDNY and Southern District of New York are real values, so a rule keyed on that string never fires. One seam reads court name, jurisdiction and type together, recognises S.D. Cal., and refuses a contradiction.

Counting it correctly

• Counted under the forum's own rule, with the count written out

  Shipped

  The trigger day is excluded, calendar days counted, a last day on a weekend or court holiday rolled to the next open day under that forum's own rule: New York's General Construction Law, California's Code of Civil Procedure, Texas Rule 4, Florida's judicial administration rule.

• Service method moves the date, and so does the order it is applied in

  Mail adds three days federally and five in California, New York and Florida. Electronic adds nothing federally since 2016, and two COURT days in California, skipping closures while counting. Some forums extend the period and roll once; the federal order rolls, adds, rolls again.

• Which holidays close which courthouse, and which way the bias runs

  Three closure calendars: federal, Nevada with Nevada Day and Family Day and no Columbus Day, and a narrow shared set elsewhere. Under-rolling files early; over-rolling files late. A backward period rolls to the PRECEDING open day, so backward counting runs on the over-inclusive calendar.

• Two calculators, one set of rules

  Carriers ask for redundant docketing, so a second calculator recomputes the date by different arithmetic: calendar-field iteration, its own closure table and ordering. The legal data stays shared. A disagreement raises an item saying not to calendar the date until an attorney resolves it.

What may reach the calendar

• An asymmetry the build enforces

  Around ten paths may propose a date. Five paths across four allowlisted files may write one to the calendar, each naming where confirmation comes from, and a build guard fails on a sixth site. Each re-parses the date, since the thirty-first of June rolls.

• Only a modelled forum reaches the calendar

  Persisting needs a federal rule in a federal forum, or a cited rule for that state and deadline, and the refusal names which is missing. A suggestion may show a warned federal fallback. Researched rules reach one attorney-verified seam, feeding suggestions, never the calendar.

When it changes

• The derivation, stored beside the date

  Shipped

  A calendared row keeps the rule, the trigger and its date, the service method, the period, the forum, the citation, the day-count narrative and the document that started it. Recomputability is derived, not trusted: a row missing what a recompute needs is marked an assertion.

• Drift is detected and proposed, never applied

  Inputs move: a stipulation extends time, a corrected proof says mailed, not handed over, a forum is fixed from federal to state. The row is stamped drifted and an item raised. Nothing on the calendar moves; applying it re-derives from scratch, re-asking the forum question.

• A cascade that follows the trigger

  Shipped

  One trigger fans out to the tree, and a moved trigger recomputes that tree from each stored derivation. The supersede pass reaches open suggestions only, never a date an attorney confirmed. A dependent clock whose event has not happened surfaces undated, naming the event.

• Judge and forum rules, asked once

  Shipped

  A forum's standing rules are captured once, not re-asked per matter. A judge's individual practice is overlaid on a suggestion only where an attorney verified it, carrying the verification date in the text it writes. Draft research may warn; it may not move a date.

On the calendar

• A day, not an instant

  A litigation deadline is a calendar day. Held as a midnight timestamp it renders as the PREVIOUS day in United States time zones, a real slip on a filing date, so the column holds a date and every surface, client and mobile, parses it locally.

• What is proposed sits beside what is calendared

  One docket carries confirmed dates beside computed ones, the second in a provisional lane that cannot be mistaken for a deadline: dashed rule, not-calendared pill, no controls to edit, resolve or remove, and the derivation showing, because the derivation is what is being confirmed.

• The silence nobody would otherwise notice

  Two failures here raise no error and no badge, so both are swept for: a suggestion stamped urgent forty days out is re-evaluated against its stored date, and a computed date that passed unconfirmed raises a loud item, since nothing ever calendared or swept it.

Limits

• Rules differ by court, and a federal computation is not calendared on a state matter. Roughly a dozen federal districts and a handful of states carry cited local rules; every other forum gets a warned fallback on a suggestion and no calendared date.
• Court-closure calendars are modelled for the federal courts and Nevada. Every other modelled state rolls off a narrow shared set that omits the state-variable holidays on purpose, and the derivation names the calendar for the attorney to check.
• Backward rule sets are modelled for the federal courts and California. Another forum's pretrial tree arrives as undated follow-ups naming the event each one runs from, rather than as federal numbers wearing a state caption.
• A stored derivation lets a date be re-derived and disputed. It does not make the date right. This is attorney work-product and not legal advice, and a licensed attorney confirms every date that reaches a calendar.
• The proposal side carries no census and should not. Anything may suggest a date; what nothing may do is calendar one without an attorney.

What BRON refuses

• Count from today.

  A litigation period runs from service, entry of judgment or filing. Counting from the day someone opened the record, or from the date a phase was written down, produces a plausible date with no legal basis. A wrong date on a calendar looks exactly like one the attorney typed, so the matter stops watching for the real one.

• Let the model confirm its own date.

  The create-deadline tool documents a confirmed parameter that is ignored, and its schema instructs the model never to compute, infer or guess a date but to use the one the attorney stated, verbatim. Confirmation is a licensed attorney for that matter seeing the exact date and its authority before it lands, and a replayed approval token mints nothing.

• Calendar a federal period on a state matter.

  A warned federal fallback is reasonable on a suggestion. Persisting one is not. The mint gate wants a federal rule in a federal forum, or a positive, cited rule for that state and that deadline, and it names which it could not find. Applying the federal offer-of-judgment window to a California matter would have read sixteen days early, and an attorney trusting it would have treated a live offer as expired.

• Answer for a forum whose rule set is not modelled.

  A bankruptcy court, a court of appeals and the Supreme Court are all federal courts, so the forward engine once handed all three trial-court periods with no warning. Each now gets a named refusal carrying what to do instead. Half-modelling the bankruptcy rules would rebuild the defect with more confidence behind it: an adversary proceeding runs partly on the civil rules, with its own periods counted from its own events.

• Read a service description that names two methods.

  Hand delivered, confirmed by email names two methods, and the extension differs by method. Guessing electronic would add days to a personally served deadline. An ambiguous description resolves to unknown: no extension, the earliest date, and a caveat saying the method was not established. The mail pattern rejects a token preceded by an e, because the word email contains the word mail.

• Compute from a client's report of when the paper arrived.

  A client's photograph of an envelope may propose a service fact for an attorney to confirm. It may not start a cascade of real litigation deadlines. The filter sits at the source rather than at each caller, because every future caller remembering is a hope, not a floor. Verifying it promotes the fact to an attorney's finding, and it behaves like one from then on.

• Count a period of zero days.

  Some forums set a motion response from the notice of hearing rather than by a day count, and those rows carry zero days deliberately. Counting zero would mint a date equal to the trigger, a dangerously early deadline that was never a deadline. The engine throws instead and the caller falls back to manual entry with the reason on screen.

• Raise a date that passed before the matter existed.

  An intake corpus carries contract windows from years earlier. Computed and raised as urgent, sixty of them once opened a board on a date more than a thousand days over. A date that fell before the matter was opened here could not have been met, missed or extended here, so it belongs to the chronology. A deadline that passed last week because the complaint was uploaded late is different, and stays.

• Mark a deadline satisfied because a workflow finished.

  A run can end without the filing landing, and a date closed on that basis stops the matter looking at something still live. The link records what happened; a person closes the date. A deadline with no linked run reads as unstarted, and a failed read of that join says so rather than returning an empty map that reads as nothing running.

• Let a scan quietly clear a suggestion or a disagreement.

  Deadline suggestions and dual-docket divergences are deliberately outside the set the reconcile pass may auto-close. The cost is stale items on a quiet matter. The cost of the alternative is a sweep erasing a malpractice finding, and the two are not the same size.

Where did this date come from, and who checked it?

A cited rule. A service, filing or entry event. The forum's counting rules, written out beside the proposed date. An attorney confirms the trigger before a deadline reaches the calendar; an unconfirmed date remains a task.

Inputs

• Served, filed and entered documents
• Stored service facts and the fact record
• Forum, judge and local rules
• Scheduling, hearing and trial-setting orders
• Contract notice and cure windows

Outputs

• The calendar and the provisional docket
• The daily board and the brief
• Workflow runs hung off a date
• The matter chronology
• The audit trail