By Austin Bess (with contributions from our rule-set team)
At LawToolBox, accurate and current court rules are the core of our product integrity and the basis for client trust. We perform comprehensive processes combined with effective use of technology, in-house legal expertise, and collaboration with clients who are experts in their practice areas to ensure rulesets reflect current requirements across jurisdictions.
Continuous Online Monitoring
We use advanced technology to monitor official court websites and other online sources that are trustworthy where courts publish their novel rules, amendments, and orders. When changes are made, our internal system immediately alerts our legal team for review. Every morning one of our attorneys gets a cup of coffee and reviews a summary of all possible updates from the last 24 hours. This automated monitoring allows our team to identify updates as soon as they are released and often many months before release when proposed rules are approved and an effective date is announced.
Legal Review and Validation
All our rulesets are developed, reviewed, and maintained by an in-house team of attorneys and legal professionals. When automated monitoring alerts the team to a change, the team reviews and evaluates if the changes are procedural, clerical, or substantive. Substantive changes are then validated and coded into the database in a manner that ensures calculations are seamlessly integrated with the calendaring software.
Periodic and Proactive Reviews
Some jurisdictions do not have website paradigms that allow online monitoring to be reliable such as courts that create new webpages for yearly rule updates. For these scenarios LawToolBox performs proactive and unprompted reviews on a recurring basis based on the knowledge of when substantive changes are customarily made. Cadence varies by jurisdiction as informed by our own history understanding a jurisdiction’s rule update patterns. In such cases our team directly verifies current rules through the newly created official court publications.
Collaboration with Industry Experts and Clients
LawToolBox partners with clients who are experts in their respective subject matter and jurisdictions. Feedback is a key part of our process to maintain an accurate and practical product. Collaboration with these clients ensures we do not just validate the substantive aspects of a rule change but that we also implement them in a way that aligns with real-world workflows. When you put new deadlines into the LawToolBox product feedback is almost instantaneous as our community contributes their thoughts and expertise. LawToolBox essentially functions as an aggregator of knowledge from the best legal minds in legal.
Engagement with the Legal Community
Our team at LawToolbox actively participates in national conferences and professional associations concerned with court rules and docketing. Organizations such as the National Docketing Association (NDA) and similar organizations dedicated to legal operations, docketing, calendaring, and court procedures are more resources LawToolBox uses to stay at the forefront of industry developments to develop best practices. A huge benefit of attending these events is we get to meet our clients face-to-face!
Support and Quality Assurance
LawToolBox maintains a team available daily on business days to assist in inquiries related to rules, deadlines, and software functionality. Staff consists of legal professionals and technical specialists who investigate issues that are reported, verify potential discrepancies, and coordinate with appropriate internal teams to implement solutions as needed. Our team loves to work with and learn from your team.
Citations and Source Transparency
LawToolBox deadlines are grounded in the governing rules or statues from which they are derived. For the sake of transparency, and to empower users to verify calculations, deadlines within LawToolBox include citations to their authoritative source. Wherever possible, LawToolBox also provides direct links to official, publicly available court or government websites where rules, code sections, or orders are published. We have found these practices allow users to quickly reference underlying authorities and confirm the current language of rules. By pairing automation with transparent citation, LawToolBox facilitates users being able to trust automated calculations, while also having the ability to immediately verify every calculated date.
Conclusion
LawToolBox is another set of eyes watching for rule changes and keeping our clients up to date on current laws and regulations impacting deadline compliance.
