docket-watcher

Docket Watcher — managed-agent template

Overview

Monitors court dockets for matters in the active litigation portfolio. Trellis covers state trial courts; CourtListener / PACER covers federal. For each active matter the agent pulls new filings since the last check, maps filing types to candidate deadlines, cross-references against the matter's history and open deliverables, and produces a docket status report plus a structured deadline feed.

Same source as the docket-watcher agent in the litigation-legal Claude Code plugin — this directory is the Managed Agent cookbook for POST /v1/agents.

⚠️ Before you deploy

• Computed deadlines are leads, not calendar entries. Court deadline rules vary by jurisdiction, court, judge, and local rule, and can be modified by standing order or case-specific case management order. Missing a court deadline has malpractice consequences. A licensed attorney verifies every computed deadline against the court's actual rules and any case-specific orders before it is docketed. The agent is upstream of that decision, not a substitute for it.
• Filing classifications are heuristic. A filing the agent misclassifies — an administrative motion read as a dispositive motion, a stipulation read as a discovery dispute — can produce a wrong deadline rule. Read the filing; do not trust the label.
• An unknown court is not a default. If the jurisdiction-rule table does not cover a court, the mapper must produce confidence: low + needs_verification: true, never a silent default. If you see a confident deadline on an obscure court, treat the rule table as stale until proven otherwise.
• A quiet docket is not a clean docket. Clerks docket late. Minute entries sometimes arrive days after the event. "No new filings" is a statement about the feed, not a statement about the case.

Deploy

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
export TRELLIS_MCP_URL=...
export COURTLISTENER_MCP_URL=...
export GDRIVE_MCP_URL=...
../../scripts/deploy-managed-agent.sh docket-watcher

Steering events

See steering-examples.json.

Security & handoffs

Court filings are public records, but they are also UNTRUSTED INPUT. The filer controls the text and can embed prompts, URLs, and instructions aimed at the agent. Three-tier isolation:

Tier	Touches filings?	Tools	Connectors
docket-reader	Yes	Read, Grep only	trellis, courtlistener (read-only)
deadline-mapper / Orchestrator	No — sees structured JSON only	Read, Grep, Glob, Agent	gdrive (jurisdiction config, read-only)
tracker-writer (Write-holder)	No	Read, Write, Edit	None

docket-reader returns length-capped, schema-validated JSON. deadline-mapper has no MCP and no web — it applies rules the deploying team has configured. tracker-writer produces ./out/docket-report-<date>.md and ./out/deadlines.yaml and never sees raw filings.

Adaptation notes

This cookbook is a starting point. It will not work in production until you have done the following:

• Set the MCP URLs. TRELLIS_MCP_URL and COURTLISTENER_MCP_URL must point at your deployment's endpoints, with whatever authentication your platform requires. GDRIVE_MCP_URL (or a substitute) points at wherever your jurisdiction-rule tables live.
• Load the portfolio. The agent reads matters/_log.yaml plus the per-matter docket_id and court from the deploying team's litigation-legal configuration. If your docketing system is the source of truth, front it with an MCP or a scheduled sync into the config path.
• Configure jurisdiction rules. Ship the deadline-mapper a local-rule table for every court in your portfolio. Federal rules you can encode once; state trial courts and individual judges are where the landmines live. An unknown court should produce confidence: low + needs_verification: true, never a silent default.
• Wire delivery. Decide where the output goes: your docketing system ingests ./out/deadlines.yaml; the narrative report goes to Slack, email, or your matter management workspace; critical flags route to whoever you want woken up.
• Set the schedule. Weekly for most matters; daily for anything with a hearing inside 14 days, any trial or late-discovery posture, or any risk: critical matter.

Computed deadlines are leads, not calendar entries

The computed deadlines this agent produces require human verification against the controlling local rule, standing order, and case management order before they are calendared. Missing a court deadline has malpractice consequences. This agent surfaces deadlines; a human verifies and dockets them.

Every deadline carries confidence and needs_verification fields. The report segregates low-confidence entries and stamps a verification callout on anything not derived from an unambiguous federal rule. Treat that as the minimum — not the ceiling — of human review. Judges override defaults by individual order, local rules change, and the date the clerk actually docketed service may differ from the date the docket displays.

Not guaranteed: this agent recommends a deadline; the docketing attorney confirms against the controlling rule and books the date.