It’s 4:47 on a Friday afternoon. Run the tape forward with me; the scenario is invented, the mechanics aren’t.

A notice lands in the intake queue. It amends a date that three other deadlines hang from, the service method changes the calculation, and a second notice from the same matter doesn’t agree with the first. The docketing clerk has seen this movie. She knows which source controls when notices conflict, how the local rule treats the weekend, and which judge’s chambers answers the phone after four.

Now put an AI assistant in that room and watch what it should and shouldn’t do.

It should read the notice, extract candidate dates, pull the related filings, and assemble the chronology she’d otherwise build by hand at quitting time. It should show her the rule and the sentence it relied on. What it must never do is quietly convert a confident guess into a controlling deadline, and it doesn’t get to tidy the queue by hiding its own uncertainty.

So the workflow we build around her has a specific shape. Every suggested date carries its source. The entry sits in a pending state that stays pending until she acts; her name’s the reviewer of record, not a policy abstraction. When she corrects the machine, both versions persist, and six months later the firm can reconstruct how the deadline entered the docket and who accepted it.

ABA Formal Opinion 512 runs the analysis through existing duties, supervision among them. My reading for docketing work: supervision has to be visible in the system itself, or it isn’t supervision, it’s an org chart.

The right first scope’s narrower than most teams want. Classify incoming notices. Extract candidates. Assemble support. Leave the controlling entry with the clerk, and measure whether her review got faster instead of pretending ownership moved.

Back to 4:47. In the version of the story where the architecture respects her, she resolves the conflict in minutes with the evidence pre-assembled, and the weekend starts on time. In the other version, a plausible entry slides into the calendar unreviewed, and the firm finds out what it cost during a malpractice deposition.

I build for the first version. The clerk was never the bottleneck; she’s the control.