Ten minutes, once. Docket reads a FINRA scheduling order, works out every date in it, and holds those dates until you have checked them. Everything below is that sentence in detail.
The one thing to take away: Docket never puts a date on your calendar by itself. Every date it reads waits, visibly unconfirmed, until someone at your firm confirms it against the order. Which person that is, is your firm’s call — Docket does not enforce it. That gate is the product, and it is the reason this is a tool that helps you docket a case rather than one that claims to have docketed it for you.
Two ways, and they do exactly the same thing.
Upload it. New case in the sidebar, then choose the PDF. Best when you are sitting with the order already open.
Or forward it. Your firm has a private address on the Settings page — something like docket-xxxx@…. Forward the order there and it is read the same way. You can also set an Outlook rule so orders from finra.org forward themselves and you never think about it again.
Either way you get an email when the dates are ready, with a link straight to the review screen.
Docket shows you every date it found, one at a time, in two columns: what it read on the left, the order’s own words on the right. Each row cites the paragraph it came from and quotes it.
Dates the order prints — the hearing, the IPHC, the discovery cutoff — are quoted verbatim. Read the quote, glance at the date, confirm. There is a button that confirms all of the printed dates at once, because checking a date against a quote sitting beside it takes about two seconds.
Dates the order computes — “within 60 days of the first hearing” — show their arithmetic: the anchor date, the offset, and whether the order said calendar days or business days. These are the ones worth slowing down on, because an order that is silent about which kind of day it means is a judgment call, and it is yours, not ours.
Obligations with no date yet — something measured from a motion not yet served, or a ruling not yet made — are tracked with no date rather than given a wrong one.
You can edit any date before confirming it. If Docket read something that is not a deadline, dismiss it.
Until you confirm a date it is in no calendar file, no reminder email, and no deadline count. It exists only on the review screen. A case with dates still waiting shows n awaiting review in your case list until you deal with it.
Once confirmed, dates land on the case page as a running docket: past due, due today, and what is ahead. Tick an item when it is done. Nothing is ever marked done for you.
Add a deadline at the bottom of that page for anything the panel sets later — a briefing schedule, a continued conference, a date from a phone call.
An amended order is handled by sending it in the same way you sent the first one. It attaches to the existing case as an amendment and its dates go through review like any others.
Download calendar file on the case page gives you an .ics containing the confirmed dates. Open it and your calendar imports them — Outlook, Google, Apple, all the same.
It is a snapshot, not a live feed. If you confirm more dates later or the panel moves the hearing, download it again. Your calendar will not update on its own.
A digest goes out on weekday mornings — but only on mornings when there is something to say. A quiet fortnight means no mail, which is what keeps the mail worth opening. It fires when:
That last section is headed Needs attention. Read it. It means a message arrived and Docket could not tell what it was, so nothing was docketed and you need to handle it the way you would have before any of this existed.
Worth knowing before you rely on it for anything.
It cannot see your mailbox. There is no mail connection and no inbox access — only the messages you forward. That is a deliberate design choice: reading a firm’s inbox to find scheduling orders would mean holding standing access to privileged correspondence that has nothing to do with docketing.
It does not know your local rules, your firm’s internal lead times, or the deadlines that come from anywhere other than the order you sent it.
It does not replace your calendaring system. It supplements one. If Docket is the only place a date lives, a bug in Docket is a missed deadline.
It can misread an order. That is not a hedge, it is the reason the review screen exists — and the reason every date on it is shown next to the sentence it came from. Check the quote, not the date.
This service is software, not legal services, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Dates identified here — including computed dates — are provisional until confirmed by counsel, and you remain responsible for verifying each one against the underlying order and applicable rules.