Daily reminder of open docket and filing deadlines from a firm-maintained Sheet, at 30/14/7/3/1-day windows, flagging anything past due. It does NOT calculate deadlines from court rules and is not legal advice.

Provided free and as is, without warranty of any kind — including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and the accuracy or completeness of any result. See the licence. You are responsible for checking what this produces before relying on it.

Docket Deadline Watcher

A second set of eyes on the calendar, every morning.

What it does

Reads your Docket Google Sheet, sorts open deadlines into 30/14/7/3/1-day windows, flags anything already past due, and sends one digest to the docket clerk or responsible attorney.

What it does NOT do

It does not calculate deadlines. This is the whole design, and it is not a limitation to be fixed later.

A filing date depends on the rule, the jurisdiction, the method of service, court holidays, local standing orders, and whether anything tolled. Getting that wrong is a malpractice claim, not a bug report. A tool that computed the date would be the one worth having and the one that eventually costs somebody their licence.

You enter the date the responsible attorney determined. This reminds you of it. Keep using your rules-based calendaring product for the math, if you have one, and this for the reminder.

It is not legal advice, and every digest says so in the first three lines. Keep that text.

Setup

1. Google Sheet

Tab Docket with this header:

matter	client	court	deadline_type	due_date	responsible_attorney	notes	status	source

status values: open | filed | continued | closed — only open is alerted on
Dates in YYYY-MM-DD. A row with an unparseable date is skipped rather than guessed at

Use the source column. Record where the date came from — the order, the rule, the scheduling entry. When somebody asks in six months why a date was what it was, that column is the answer, and it costs one extra field at entry time.

2. Credential + contact

Replace the placeholders: - <<GOOGLE_WORKSPACE_CREDENTIAL>> — Google Workspace credential with Sheets read scope - <<DOCKET_SHEET_ID>> — the sheet ID from its URL - <<DOCKET_CLERK_PUBLISHER>> — who gets the digest

3. Schedule

Daily, early. 6:00 AM means a past-due entry is seen before the day starts.

Customization

Windows. WINDOWS in the compose task. Firms with heavy motion practice often add a 60-day window.
Per-attorney digests. Column F is already read and printed. Filter on it in compose and run once per attorney.
Escalation. The send task uses whatever channels the contact has configured. A same-day deadline is a reasonable case for SMS as well as email.

Source

workflow.iml