Reminders for court dates and prescription dates
How the Legal pack reminds staff before court and prescription dates, when it can remind the client, and who switches client reminders on.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Legal businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
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Missing a court date is embarrassing and expensive. Missing a prescription date can be far worse: the client's claim may be lost for good, and the conversation that follows is one no practitioner wants to have. Both kinds of date are usually known well in advance. When they are missed, the failure is almost always one of attention, not of knowledge.
Achekam's Legal pack sends reminders ahead of both, to the people working on the matter and, before a court date, to the client too. This article covers the schedule, the channels, and the controls that sit with an administrator.
Why prescription dates deserve their own reminders
A court date is set by someone outside the practice and is usually diarised the day it is allocated. A prescription date is different. Someone in the practice has to work it out from the facts of the claim and the law that applies, and then it sits quietly on the file, sometimes for years, with nothing to prompt anyone. The matters most at risk are the ones waiting on a client's instructions, the ones a colleague has inherited, and the ones that were opened in a rush and never properly reviewed. In South Africa the periods, and the rules on when prescription begins to run and when it is interrupted, are in the Prescription Act 68 of 1969, whose Chapter III deals with the prescription of debts.
That is why the pack gives prescription a longer run of reminders than court dates, starting months rather than days ahead.
The reminder schedule for staff
| Date on the matter | Staff are reminded |
|---|---|
| Court date | 7 days before and 1 day before |
| Prescription date | 90 days, 30 days and 7 days before |
Treat the reminders as stages of work rather than alarms. The first prescription reminder is the moment to take instructions and gather what is needed to act; the second is the point by which the decision to proceed should have been made; the last is a final warning, not a plan.
All of this depends on the dates being recorded. A matter in the Legal pack carries its court dates, so the first discipline is entering each date on the matter as soon as it is known.
Reminding the client before a court date
The pack can also remind the client 3 days before a court date. That helps with clients who must attend, bring documents, or simply be reachable on the day.
Reminders to clients carry their own safeguards:
- each one stays off until a workspace administrator switches it on;
- once on, a reminder goes out at most once, so the client never receives the same message repeatedly;
- reminders to clients are limited by a daily cap.
Decide as a practice whether you want client reminders at all, and say so in your client care letter. Some clients welcome a short written reminder. For others, especially a nervous witness or a client facing a difficult hearing, a call from the attorney or advocate is the better route, and the reminder can stay off.
E-mail and in-app, with no SMS or WhatsApp
Reminders go by e-mail and inside the app. There is no SMS channel and no WhatsApp. For staff this rarely matters, since they are in the app every day. For clients it means the reminder depends on an e-mail address that is correct and actually read.
Check the client's e-mail address at intake and again when a matter is set down. If a client lives on their phone's messaging apps and rarely opens e-mail, plan to contact them yourself before an important date, whatever the system sends.
Getting the dates right in the first place
A reminder is only as good as the date behind it. A few habits guard against the common errors:
- Enter court dates the day they are allocated, together with what the date is for.
- Calculate the prescription date when the matter is opened, record how it was calculated, and have a second practitioner check it.
- Review prescription dates on dormant matters at set intervals, not only when a reminder fires.
- When a matter changes hands, the new practitioner reads its key dates on day one.
- When a date moves, change it on the matter at once, so reminders follow the new date.
Reminders are a second line of defence behind a diary system the practice already trusts, not a replacement for it.
It also helps to decide who owns each date. A reminder that reaches everyone on a matter can end up acted on by no one, each person assuming another has it in hand. Name one practitioner as responsible for every court date and every prescription date, and make that person's job to confirm, when the reminder arrives, that the work behind the date is on track. If they are on leave, the handover note lists their dates for the coming weeks.
A quick reference
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who is reminded of court dates? | Staff, 7 days and 1 day before; the client 3 days before, if switched on |
| Who is reminded of prescription dates? | Staff, 90, 30 and 7 days before |
| Which channels? | E-mail and in-app only |
| Who controls client reminders? | A workspace administrator switches each on |
| Can a client be flooded? | No: each reminder is sent at most once, within a daily cap |
Court dates and the litigation work around them are covered in tracking pleadings and discovery on a litigation matter. Matters begin as enquiries, as described in turning an enquiry into a consultation and a matter, and the earlier the dates are captured, the earlier the reminders can help.
Before switching the pack on, list every open matter's court and prescription dates and enter them on the matters. Reminders can only work from dates that are there.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
