The cases, parties, doctors, carriers, employers, case IDs, and dates in this post are fictitious demonstration data. They illustrate how the brief behaves and what it surfaces. No real client information is shown.

Tuesday morning at an applicant firm. The attorney opens her laptop, types two words — morning brief — and waits. The system pulls events for the week, tasks across all cases, the mail queue, and her active caseload. About three seconds later it puts up the first paragraph.

Before this week, that first paragraph would have looked something like this:

EVENTS THIS WEEK: 25
TASKS: 612 overdue, 28 due today, 14 due this week
DANGER CHECK:
  Roe v. Pacific Freight — DEPO Tuesday — prepTasks=true
  Doe v. Westbrook Mfg — QME Wednesday — prepTasks=true
  Doe v. Acme Logistics — DR-DEPO Thursday — prepTasks=true
  Doe v. Coastal Health — DEPO next Tuesday — prepTasks=true

Reads fine. prepTasks=true across the board. Nothing on fire. Move on.

Except it wasn't fine. Three of those cases were headed into formal proceedings — two depositions, one cross-examination of an expert physician — where the attorney had not spoken to the client in more than six months.

What the new brief shows

Same firm. Same data. Same caseload. Run the new brief instead:

DANGER [CASE-ID-1] Doe, Jane v. Acme Logistics
  DR-DEPO 5/28/2026 in 3 days
  Score: 85
  No prep task. 287 days since last client contact.

DANGER [CASE-ID-2] Doe, John v. Westbrook Manufacturing
  QME+AME 5/27/2026 in 1 day
  Score: 45
  Prep exists, but 412 days since last client contact.

DANGER [CASE-ID-3] Roe, Maria v. Northstar Retail
  AME 5/28/2026 in 3 days
  Score: 45
  Prep exists, but 270 days since last client contact.

One sentence per case. Each ends with the part the attorney actually needs to know.

The first case shows a doctor cross-examination in three days, no prep task on file, 287 days since the last client contact. That is a malpractice complaint waiting to happen — the client will not remember what they told the doctor a year ago, the attorney will not be able to anticipate the medical opinions, and the cross will go badly.

The second case: a QME plus AME tomorrow. There IS a prep task on the case. But 412 days since the attorney spoke to the client. Even with prep notes, going into a medical exam with a client who has not been briefed in over a year is a problem.

Why the old brief missed this

Three reasons. First, the old brief was looking at "prep tasks" by counting any task on the case with a due date before the event. A case with thirty routine open tasks (file lien letter, follow up on records, send NOR) all looked "prepared" because thirty tasks were due before Wednesday. None of them had anything to do with prep.

Second, the old brief had no way to measure how long it had been since the attorney spoke to the client. That signal — arguably the single most important one before any formal proceeding — wasn't computed at all.

Third, two important event types weren't on the danger list. AME appointments (where the medical examiner determines the level of permanent disability — directly tied to settlement value) and physician cross-examinations weren't flagged. Today's data: nine AME and Dr-depo events this week. The old brief silently skipped all of them.

What changed

The new brief replaces the meaningless prep-task check with one that looks at what the task actually says. If the title contains "prep client," "case summary," "witness prep," "hearing prep," "MSC prep," or similar — that's a real prep task. "Review medical records" is not. "Send brief to opposing counsel" is not.

It adds the client-contact signal. For up to eight unique cases on the danger list, it pulls the activities and looks at when the most recent telephone call or email to/from the client was logged. The result becomes part of the per-case line.

It adds AME appointments and physician depositions to the danger list. Those are formal appearances, they need prep, they belong in the brief.

And it computes a score per case so the most urgent appears first. The first illustrative case — 287 days no contact, no prep, three days away — scores 85. That sits at the top. Cases in good shape don't show up at all.

The overdue list changed too

Old brief's top five overdue tasks, every morning, looked like this:

1. 2,372 days old — Sample-A — petition for 5710 fees
2. 2,372 days old — Sample-B — petition for 5710 fees
3. 2,278 days old — Sample-C — 5710 petition
4. 2,269 days old — Sample-D — 5710 fees
5. 1,942 days old — Sample-E — petition for 5710 fee

All from 2019, 2020, 2021. Probably on cases that have long since stipulated. The attorney scrolls past it every single morning. It's noise.

The new brief sorts by priority first, then by age. HIGH priority items rise. The five tasks at the top are now real current attorney work that needs attention today.

What this actually means in practice

The attorney spends maybe 30 seconds reading the brief in the morning. That 30 seconds determines what gets attention that day. If the brief lies — if it tells her everything is prepared when nothing is — she walks into the deposition unprepared.

If the brief tells her "Doe case, DR-depo in 3 days, 287 days no contact, no prep task," she picks up the phone, calls the client, and books an hour to prep. That's a settlement value protected, a malpractice complaint avoided, a credibility-with-the-judge preserved.

Three seconds of compute. One sentence of output. The difference between knowing and not knowing.

Scale

In a typical applicant practice of 150-200 open cases, the new brief routinely surfaces a handful of cases with more than 200 days since last client contact, all going to formal proceedings this week. That's not unusual — busy attorneys lose track of who they last called, especially on cases waiting on QME reports or carrier responses. The brief's job is to surface what fell through.

The old brief was not doing that job. The new brief is.