Deadlines desk: capabilities and limits

A walkthrough (fictional)

Fictional matter — demonstration: Invented names and facts; nothing here is a real client, party, court or filing.

Every name, party, court and matter below is invented for illustration.

1. The invented firm Harrow & Vale LLP records that interrogatories in the sample matter were served by e-mail on a stated day, from the served document itself.
2. The forum resolves to the Florida circuit court, civil division; the counter reads Rule 2.514, counts the 30 days, rolls a closed last day, adds nothing for e-service, and the independent calculator reaches the same day.
3. The date appears in the proposal lane, dashed and marked not calendared, with its derivation; a licensed attorney confirms the trigger and the rule, and only then does the write gate calendar it.
4. A corrected proof of service later stamps the row drifted; nothing moves until the attorney applies the re-derivation as a new proposal.

Mechanisms

• —The forum resolution seam: court, jurisdiction and matter type resolved together; contradictions refused; unmodelled forums named.
• —Forum counting rules as tables (Rule 2.514; Rule 6) read by one counter; named closure calendars; service arithmetic in forum order.
• —The independent cross-check calculator that shares no helper; a disagreement calendars nothing.
• —Derivations beside every date; recomputability derived; every change a proposal; one central write gate with an attorney confirmation and a build guard on write sites.
• —Trigger extraction that never computes: the reader returns an event, a verbatim date and a rule from a closed list.
• —Refusal: Counting a period from today instead of from the recorded trigger event. Instead: Record the event and its verbatim date from the document; the count starts there.
• —Refusal: Counting a zero-day period. Instead: A period is a positive whole number of days; a same-day obligation is recorded as an assertion with its rule, not computed.
• —Refusal: Calendaring a federal period on a state-court matter, or a state period on a federal one. Instead: Resolve the forum first; the counting rule follows the forum, never the other way round.
• —Refusal: Answering for a forum the engine does not model. Instead: The refusal names the missing model; count from the official rule by hand and record the derivation as an assertion.
• —Refusal: Reading a service description that names more than one method. Instead: The earliest date is shown with a caveat; the record names the governing method before any later date is relied on.
• —Refusal: Computing a deadline from a client’s report of when paper arrived. Instead: The report proposes a service fact; an attorney confirms it, and only then is a trigger recorded.
• —Refusal: Raising a deadline that passed before the matter existed. Instead: A trigger earlier than the matter’s opening is recorded as history with its date, never raised as a live deadline.
• —Refusal: Marking a deadline satisfied because a run, an export or a filing packet finished. Instead: Satisfaction is an attorney’s recorded act with the proof of filing or service.
• —Refusal: Auto-closing a suggestion, a drifted row or a calculator disagreement. Instead: Each stays open until an attorney decides it by name.

Limits

• —Florida circuit civil, county civil and probate, and the federal district civil forum are modelled; every other forum is counted by hand and recorded as an assertion.
• —The rule parameters read verified only after the owner pins the official compilation and the check passes; until then every date says pending official verification.
• —A computed date is arithmetic on recorded inputs under the cited rule, never a legal conclusion; court orders, tolling and service disputes can change everything.

Always stops for a person (the autonomy floor)

• —Nothing is sent to anyone outside the platform without a person choosing to send it. (minimum: person)
• —No share link leaves without a person minting it for a named recipient. (minimum: person)
• —No artifact is finalized without an attorney’s recorded decision on its exact version. (minimum: attorney)
• —No final packet or external delivery leaves without an attorney’s approval and the export gate. (minimum: attorney)
• —Nothing is deleted without a person confirming the deletion; legal holds refuse it outright. (minimum: person)
• —A matter’s state (open, closed, on hold, archived) changes only when a person changes it. (minimum: person)

What this desk refuses

From the refusals catalogue (45 rows apply); the full catalogue is at /refusals.

• Representation of any kind: filing, service, negotiation with a party, or appearance, for anyone.

  A licensed attorney represents; the platform prepares.

• Reaching a matter, review, draft, comparison or governed version that belongs to another tenant, or through a removed membership.

  Work inside an active membership of the matter's tenant.

• Reaching a matter the user is screened from, on any surface, including background execution.

  The firm lifts the wall in the record; authorized colleagues keep their work.

• Sending a byte to a vendor outside the permitted list, over a non-https scheme, to a private network, or with a data class the vendor is not cleared for.

  The owner reviews the constant; the surface reports the refusal instead of substituting a vendor.

• A request path carrying a literal or encoded backslash, an invalid escape, double encoding or a control character.

  Request the route as published.

• A workflow requested for a state or task the coverage registry does not list as supported.

  Use the workflow in a supported state, or the owner adds the state to the registry with its rights, version, evaluated output and owner first.

• A decision packet with a missing or unrecognized schema version on its envelope or any manifest, an unknown field, or missing required evidence.

  Issue the packet again from the platform; the validator names each defect.

• GET /api/verify/lookup answers no-record for every digest.

  The owner decides the anchoring service; offline verification on /verify needs no lookup at all.

• Counting a period from today instead of from the recorded trigger event.

  Record the event and its verbatim date from the document; the count starts there.

• Counting a zero-day period.

  Record the same-day obligation as an assertion with its rule.

• Calendaring a federal period on a state-court matter, or a state period on a federal one.

  Resolve the forum first; the rule follows it.

• Answering for a forum the engine does not model.

  The refusal names the missing model; count from the official rule by hand and record the derivation as an assertion.

• Reading a service description that names more than one method as if one governed.

  The earliest date is shown with a caveat; the record names the governing method before any later date is relied on.

• Computing a deadline from a client’s report of when paper arrived.

  The report proposes a service fact; an attorney confirms it, and only then is a trigger recorded.

• Raising a deadline that passed before the matter existed.

  Record the earlier trigger as history with its date; nothing is raised as a live deadline.

• Marking a deadline satisfied because a run, an export or a filing packet finished.

  The attorney records satisfaction with the proof of filing or service.

• Auto-closing a suggestion, a drifted row or a calculator disagreement.

  The attorney closes each item by name.

• A component whose bounded probe did not answer reads unknown on /status and /api/status, never operational.

  Wait for the next probe, or read the component's configuration and readiness columns, which are separate from the probe.

• A vitals beacon carrying anything beyond the six coarse fields (route pattern, metric, value, device class, connection class, deployment id).

  Nothing to do: the beacon the platform ships sends only the six fields.

• Treating an owner, an admin or any role as a licensed attorney without an attested record with a bar identifier and a jurisdiction, or advertising an attested record as verified.

  A firm owner records the attestation with the bar identifier and the jurisdiction; the record then reads attested, not verified.

• A stored firm instruction that names or weakens a locked prompt (the injection guard, the UPL lint, the privilege and client-facing guardrails, the OCP standing orders, the dual-engine synthesis), or an instruction of a kind outside the permitted list.

  Keep firm instructions to the house voice, terminology, formatting, the signature block and jurisdiction preferences.

• Sending, sharing externally, finalizing, exporting a final packet, deleting or changing a matter's state without a person confirming that act, or confirming more than one such act in one approval, or a firm setting that lowers the floor.

  Confirm each act on its own; raise the firm's confirmation level if the firm wants a second reviewer.

• Serving a privileged document on an API key, or reaching a matter outside owner ∪ firm partition − screens ∩ allow-list.

  Read the document as the attorney on the desk; the key reads ordinary and client-producible material only.

• Minting, returning or accepting a confirmation token through the API, MCP, batch or any cancellation path; executing anything beyond a proposal.

  Propose through the door; an attorney accepts the proposal to the rail on the desk, where the full gate stack runs.

• Reporting a read as verified when any item in it is weaker, or reporting an unread table as empty.

  Read the per-item statuses and the read_state; an unreadable read is retried or escalated, never treated as empty.

• Answering a faulted read with an empty 200, or a failed check with a pass.

  Retry after the store recovers; the response names the fault.

• A webhook payload carrying content (text, a body, a quote, a title, a name), a log line, or a delivery to a private-network or non-https target.

  Resolve the pointer through the API; register an https target on a public host.

• A connector whose registry entry reads planned or pilot presented as connected, syncing or live anywhere.

  Use the export and compose-link paths that are live today; the owner activates a connector on confirmed demand.

• A retry that would re-send a done operation, or an operation whose other side answers a different matter than the recorded mapping.

  A firm member corrects the mapping by name; the operation is re-queued only then.

• Treating a passed biometric on the phone as server authorization, or extending a revoked session because the shell unlocked, or placing anything privileged on a lock screen or in a notification.

  Sign in again; the shell opens but the desk waits for the server.

• Deleting a matter, an account or a firm while a legal hold covers it.

  The attorney or the owner releases the hold by name when it ends; the deletion then runs and produces its receipt.

• Placing a legal hold without a reason or without a review date within a year.

  Place the hold with its reason and a review date, and review it on that date.

• Serving a restored database before the later ledgers are re-applied: a deleted row, a revoked share, key or grant, a superseded approval, or a job that would resume by itself.

  Apply the post-restore actions and pass the verification; interrupted jobs are re-run only by a person.

• A removed user reading, launching work or acting through a connector; identity recovery restoring more than the sign-in.

  A firm administrator re-adds the member by name; a connector the user connected is taken over by name or revoked.

• A procurement, trust or lifecycle document claiming a certification the platform does not hold (SOC 2 certified or compliant, HIPAA compliant, bank-grade and the like).

  Read the controls with their evidence in the procurement package; a certification appears only after its report exists.

• A published accuracy or outcome percentage without its count and denominator, or over a denominator too small to carry it.

  Read the count and the denominator; the percentage appears when the denominator can carry it.

• A claim that the platform outperforms a named competitor without a matched, blinded study on the same matters with its method published.

  Compare what each product publishes; the benchmark reports this platform on its own terms.

• Adopting or advertising an upgrade as better on fewer than twenty blind, versioned pairs, on an unmet margin, or with a serious regression.

  Run more blind pairs; keep the preserved baseline in service meanwhile.

• Selling a matter, a tier or an upgrade before the purchase-to-approved-export acceptance passed in controlled accounts.

  Evaluate on the sample matter; purchases open when the owner records the acceptance and the activation.

• A second grant, a second delivery or a revived benefit from a duplicate, reordered or post-refund event.

  Support reconciles a quarantined purchase by hand from the provider record.

• A saving, a return on investment or a projection presented as unit economics, or a price changed from the economics module.

  Read the observed cost per accepted deliverable with its counts.

• Opening the accounts door before the SMTP proof and the Auth switches, opening commerce before the acceptance, or treating the activation record as approved without the owner.

  The owner reviews the record, chooses the cohorts and approves it by name.

• Counting a configuration check, a keyless run that stops at the transport, or a DraftBench skip as live proof of a program.

  The owner runs npm run live-proof with the keys in a session shell and commits the receipts.

• A positioning statement that ranks, uses a superlative or disparages another product.

  Read the positioning facts with their evidence and qualifications.

• Building trust accounting, outcome prediction, deposition capture hardware, a public marketing-domain intake form, an in-house e-signature system or an autonomous litigation agent; or deleting a function because an expansion was declined.

  Use the bounded answers: connectors, proposals only, the attorney-lane intake link, DocuSign under the firm’s credentials.

Inputs

• —The trigger event and its verbatim date from a matter document
• —The court, jurisdiction and matter type
• —The service method as recorded
• —Court orders, clerk-observed days and chief-judge designations as named inputs

Outputs

• —A proposed date with its full derivation and the cross-check
• —A calendared date only after a licensed attorney confirms the trigger and the rule
• —Review items for disagreements, drift and confirmation