Ask a practitioner why a matter went out of time and you will rarely hear a misreading of the Limitation Act. You will hear that the starting date was never captured, or was captured in a place nobody looked at again.
The three dates that matter
For most causes of action, the whole question reduces to three dates, and only the first is genuinely hard:
The date the right to sue accrued.
The date of any acknowledgement that restarts the clock.
The date of filing.
The first is a legal judgment. The other two are bookkeeping, and bookkeeping is what systems are for.
Where the dates actually come from
Source | Reliable for | Caveat |
|---|---|---|
eCourts cause-list | Hearing dates | Lags on the day of listing |
Order sheet | Directions and adjournments | Scanned; needs reading |
Client file | Accrual and acknowledgement | Often incomplete |
Postal records | Service and receipt | Keep the original |
The lag problem
Cause-lists are published the evening before, and revised on the morning. A system that polls once a day will be wrong on exactly the days it matters.
A date you learn about after the hearing is not a date. It is a post-mortem.
What good looks like
Every matter has an accrual date, even if approximate
Acknowledgements are recorded with their evidence
Cause-list sync runs more than once a day
Limitation is computed, not remembered
Why not just set a calendar reminder?
Because a reminder is set once, by one person, against one understanding of the accrual date. When the understanding changes — and it does, on the first substantive reading of the file — the reminder does not.
A computed date changes when its inputs change. That is the whole difference.
Further reading
The court's own explanation of how cause-lists are compiled is worth twenty minutes: eCourts services.