# Never miss a statutory deadline again.

> Horizontal docketing & deadline watch

One deterministic deadline clock over every asset that carries a statutory deadline — patents, trademarks, entity good-standing, UCC-1 lapse windows, court dockets. Enroll an asset and the watch opens on api.lawyer in real time: a live countdown, rung alarms, and a vacancy alarm the moment a docket has no owner.

**Dead air always has a named owner — a watch with none reads VACANT, by design**

$12 per monitored asset / month · closed only by evidence · replaces Anaqua & CPA Global

## A missed deadline is the one malpractice you cannot argue with

Most legal deadlines are not judgment calls — they are dates. A statement of use, a §8 declaration, a maintenance fee, a franchise-tax filing, a UCC-1 continuation, an answer date. Miss one and the asset is gone or the client is exposed, and no amount of skill undoes it.

The incumbents — Anaqua, CPA Global — sell this as enterprise software: annual seat licenses, an implementation project, a portfolio you migrate. A solo, a small firm, or one in-house counsel watching a handful of assets pays for all of it and uses none of it.

*You do not need a portfolio-management platform. You need one clock that never sleeps, one alarm that fires before it is too late, and the honesty to tell you when a docket has no owner.*

## per monitored asset · per month · no seats, no minimums

**$12 per monitored asset, per month.**

- One deterministic deadline clock per asset — the same ladder whether it watches a patent, a mark, an entity, a lien, or a docket
- Rung alarms as the clock crosses each threshold: notice at 30 days, escalation at 14, the final-week window at 7
- A vacancy alarm the moment an asset has no owner holding its dead air — silence is never treated as safe
- Closed only by evidence: a watch clears when you file the receipt, never on a guess

- _Cancel a watch the moment the deadline is satisfied — you pay only for assets you are actually watching._
- _Registry and court-access fees (PACER and the like) pass through at cost, never marked up._

Why a flat per-asset subscription: the watch is software — a deterministic clock and a set of reads. You pay for coverage of one more asset, not for a practitioner’s hour. The one thing software cannot do — a human owning the dead air between acts — is a separate, described engagement with an independent attorney.

## What a watch does

1. **You enroll an asset** — Pick the asset class, give it a reference and a jurisdiction. The watch opens on api.lawyer and its deadline clock starts — no migration, no implementation, no seat license.
2. **The clock runs deterministically** — Time enters the ladder only through explicit ticks, so a watch replayed from the same ticks fires the same rungs. It is auditable by construction — the countdown is never a wall-clock guess.
3. **Rungs fire before it matters** — Notice at 30 days out, escalation at 14, a daily-acknowledgment window through the final week. The vacancy alarm fires the instant a live deadline has no owner holding its dead air.
4. **It closes only on evidence** — A watch clears when you file the receipt — the USPTO acknowledgment, the stamped filing. At the deadline itself, the only lawful answers are four enumerated outcomes. Nothing lapses silently.

## One clock, every asset class

The deadline clock is asset-class-agnostic — the same ladder watches a patent and a franchise-tax filing. Each class feeds its clock from a status read. Live enrollment today covers the classes with ratified jurisdiction rules; the rest are described capability, enrolled the same way once ratified.

### The reads that feed a watch — GET · unreserved data

| method | path | note | status |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| GET | `/patent/{number}/status` | USPTO prosecution history & maintenance windows | live |
| GET | `/trademark/{serial}/status` | TSDR status, §8/§9 & statement-of-use dates | live |
| GET | `/entity/{state}/{id}/standing` | Secretary of State good standing & annual report | live |
| GET | `/lien/ucc/{state}/{filing}` | UCC-1 status & lapse / continuation window | described |
| GET | `/court/{district}/{case}/docket` | federal docket & filing deadlines (PACER access) | described |

### The deadline clock (the live machinery) — the Deadline Ladder on api.lawyer

| method | path | note | status |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| POST | `/deadlines/{asset}/monitor` | name who holds the watch — clears the vacancy alarm | live |
| GET | `/deadlines/{asset}` | the live snapshot: countdown, alarm, rungs | live |
| POST | `/deadlines/{asset}/tick` | advance the deterministic clock; fires rung events | live |
| POST | `/deadlines/{asset}/satisfy` | close by evidence — the filing receipt | live |
| POST | `/deadlines/{asset}/resolve` | choose the enumerated terminal-rung outcome at t-0 | live |

> One rung is deliberately absent from this list: the final-week daily human acknowledgment (POST /deadlines/{asset}/ack). That is a reserved human duty of an independent attorney holding the Monitoring Engagement — described below, never performed by this service.

*“live” means docketing drives it against api.lawyer right now; the rest is honest description of the substrate’s catalog, not a claim it is polling today.*

## Who owns the dead air

A machine watch tells you a deadline is coming. It cannot be responsible for it. Between the atomic acts, the duty to a live docket belongs to a person — and docketing.legal is precise about that line.

- **SOLD — The machine watch** docketing.legal takes the watch as automated docket machinery: the deterministic clock, the rung alarms, the vacancy alarm, and the close-on-evidence. This is what your subscription buys, and it is running on api.lawyer the moment you enroll an asset.
- **DESCRIBED — The Monitoring Engagement** For a human owner between acts, an independent attorney can hold a Monitoring Engagement — a flat-fee, limited-scope engagement that carries deadline duty until the next act. That is a reserved relationship with a licensed lawyer; it is described here, and arranged with an independent attorney, not sold on this page.
- **DESCRIBED — The final-week acknowledgment** Inside the last seven days, the ladder demands a daily human acknowledgment. That is the attorney’s reserved duty under the Monitoring Engagement — a person putting their name on the day. docketing shows you the window is open; it never performs that acknowledgment for a human.
- **ALWAYS — Or a journaled acknowledgment** If no one holds the watch, the honest alternative is a journaled client acknowledgment that the docket is unrepresented. Either way there is a record. A live deadline with neither reads VACANT — and that alarm is the feature.

## Part of a portfolio, not a silo

docketing.legal is the horizontal watch across the family. patent.click files a provisional and hands its priority-date clock straight into a watch. incorporations.legal forms an entity and hands its good-standing and franchise-tax clocks into a watch. You do not re-key an asset to monitor it — a filing becomes a watch.

- File a patent first at [patent.click](https://patent.click) — the vertical, filing-first sibling.
- Form an entity at [incorporations.legal](https://incorporations.legal) — its deadlines arrive here as watches.
- Everything runs on the substrate at [api.lawyer](https://api.lawyer) — the reads and the ladder are its catalog.

## One clock. Every asset. No silent lapse.

Open a watch on one asset in under a minute — $12 per monitored asset, per month. The clock starts on api.lawyer the moment you enroll, and it opens VACANT until someone owns it.

## For machines

- Deadline Ladder snapshot (JSON): https://api.lawyer/deadlines/{assetId}
- Substrate catalog: https://api.lawyer/docs

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Dead air always has an owner (ADR 0006): Every asset with a live statutory deadline carries either a Monitoring Engagement held by an independent attorney, or a journaled client acknowledgment that the docket is unrepresented. A watch with neither is not silent — it reads VACANT, and that alarm is the whole point. docketing.legal takes the machine watch; a human owner between acts is a described Monitoring Engagement, arranged with an independent attorney, not sold on this page.

docketing.legal — built on api.lawyer