Litigation deadline calculators

Two tools for the two kinds of date a litigator cannot afford to get wrong, and both are wrong in the same direction when they fail: they hand back a date that is later than the law allows.

Two different clocks, and mixing them is the first mistake. The court deadline calculator counts a period inside a live case under Rule 6 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: an answer due 21 days after service, a motion served 14 days before a hearing. The statute of limitations calculator answers a question from before the case exists, which is whether you can still file at all under a state limitation period. Feeding one into the other produces an answer that looks plausible and is not about your problem, so each tool names the body of law it applies and will not silently switch.

Both of these show the working instead of a date. Every other deadline calculator returns one number and asks to be trusted, which is exactly the wrong ask when a missed date is malpractice. These render an audit trail: the trigger, the raw count, every day the period stepped over and why, the statute that governs each step in the margin. You check the reasoning rather than accepting the answer, which is the only use a tool like this can honestly claim.

Counting a period is not the hard part of either tool. In federal practice the trap is direction. Rule 6(a)(5) defines "next day" as continuing forward for a period measured after an event and backward for one measured before an event, so a motion deadline landing on a Saturday moves to the preceding Friday and gives you less time, not more. A calculator that rolls it forward tells you that you may serve a day after the last lawful day. In state limitations the trap is the start: most states let the clock begin when the plaintiff discovered or reasonably should have discovered the injury, so the injury date is frequently not the accrual date.

A statute of repose can bar a claim while the limitation period still looks open. Repose runs from a fixed act, the negligent act or the sale of a product, and the discovery rule cannot reach it. A misdiagnosis discovered in year eight, under a seven year repose, has a limitation period that reads as open and a claim that has been gone for a year. That interaction is the sharpest fact either tool models and it is the one almost no competitor shows.

Where a tool cannot evaluate something, that is a visible state rather than a pass. Both of these render "could not be determined" with a reason and no date instead of a plausible date they do not stand behind, and the limitations tool goes further: a jurisdiction it does not cover is reported as uncovered, and no neighbouring state's period is ever substituted. A wrong period presented confidently is worse than no answer.

Nothing in either tool is licensed. The Federal Rules, the federal holiday statute and the executive order behind the observance shift are all United States government works. State statutes are edicts of government and cannot be copyrighted at all: in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org the Supreme Court held that even annotations authored by an arm of a state legislature were ineligible. So every figure can be quoted in full on the page beside its citation, which is what both tools do.

Neither of these is legal advice and no attorney-client relationship arises from using them. All two state where their answer stops being reliable, and on these pages that section is the most useful part: local rules, a judge's standing order, the scheduling order in your case, equitable tolling, fraudulent concealment, and a government body's own notice deadline are each capable of moving a date, and none of them is visible to a calculator.