Limitation Dates and Diarising: What Your Practice Management System Should Calculate for You

A practice management system should calculate limitation and key dates from the facts already recorded on the matter, cite the provision each date comes from, and recalculate when those facts change. MatterFirst, a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, does this with an obligations engine that shows the governing statute beside every calculated date.

Diarising is the part of practice management that everyone agrees is critical and almost nobody audits. A firm will run a file review process, reconcile trust to the cent, and still rely on one person remembering to put a date in a calendar six years before it matters. This guide sets out which dates a system should compute for you, which it should not, and how to test a product against that standard before you buy it.

The three ways a diarised date fails

Missed limitation dates rarely come from ignorance of the law. They come from three ordinary process failures.

The date was never entered. The matter opened during a busy week, the file went to a paralegal for document collection, and the limitation date lived in the acting solicitor's head until the solicitor left.

The date was entered from the wrong starting fact. Someone diarised six years from the date of the retainer rather than from the date the cause of action accrued, or from the date on the invoice rather than the date payment fell due.

The facts changed and the date did not. This is the most common failure in property and commercial work. A settlement date moves, and every date that hung off it stays where it was. The calendar entry is now actively misleading, which is worse than no entry at all, because it is trusted.

A system that only stores dates can prevent the first failure. Preventing the second and third requires the system to know how the date was derived.

The statutory periods a system should already know

General limitation periods for simple contract and tort claims are set by each state and territory. They are not uniform, and the exception matters more than the rule: the Northern Territory runs three years where every other jurisdiction runs six.

Personal injury sits on separate provisions and runs shorter: three years in Queensland under s 11 of the Limitation of Actions Act 1974, and three years in South Australia under s 36 of the Limitation of Actions Act 1936. Several jurisdictions run personal injury from discoverability rather than from accrual, with a longer backstop, so the calculation depends on a fact about the client's knowledge that a system cannot infer on its own. Actions on a deed run longer than simple contract in several jurisdictions, Tasmania included, where s 4 sets twelve years for a specialty.

Treat this table as a starting point rather than advice on a specific claim. Every one of these Acts contains extension, suspension and disability provisions, and specialist regimes sit outside them entirely.

The dates that come from the contract, not the Act

In conveyancing and property work, most of the dates that bite are contractual rather than statutory, and they move.

• Cooling off expiry, where the contract and the jurisdiction provide for it
• Finance approval date, and the notice obligation that follows if finance is not approved
• Building and pest inspection date, and the window to terminate on an adverse report
• Special condition dates, which are drafted per deal and therefore never live in a standard template
• Notice to complete, and the period it runs for once served
• Settlement date, and the sunset date in an off the plan contract

These share a property that statutory limitation dates do not: they are derived from a document that was uploaded to the matter, and they are frequently renegotiated. When a settlement date moves by a fortnight, every downstream date should move with it, and the file note should record that it moved and why. A calendar cannot do this, because a calendar entry does not know what it was computed from.

What "calculated" should actually mean

When a vendor says the product calculates key dates, ask what it means by calculates. There are five properties worth insisting on.

1. It is triggered by a matter fact. The date is derived from data on the file, such as the accrual date or the contract date, not typed in as free text.
2. It cites its authority. The date carries the provision or the contract clause that produced it, so a reviewer can check the reasoning rather than trusting the output.
3. It recalculates. Change the trigger fact and every dependent date updates, with the change recorded.
4. It escalates before the date, not on it. A reminder on the day of expiry is a record of a problem, not a control.
5. It leaves an audit trail. Who acknowledged the obligation, when, and what they did about it.

Here is where the line between automation and judgement should fall.

The useful split is that arithmetic and propagation are machine work, while characterisation is legal work. A product that blurs the two by presenting a computed date as legal advice is doing something worse than not calculating at all.

How MatterFirst handles this

MatterFirst is a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, built by North Cape Technology in Melbourne. Obligations and limitation dates are handled by a rules engine rather than by a shared calendar. A rule calculates the date from matter data and cites the governing statute alongside it, for example Limitation Act 1969 (NSW) s 14(1), so the person reviewing the file can see the basis for the date rather than taking it on trust. Key dates sync to the calendar the firm already uses.

Matters can be recorded in all eight Australian jurisdictions, which matters for the table above, because a firm acting in a Northern Territory contract dispute needs the three year rule applied and not the six year one.

Contract derived dates start from the document. Document AI extracts key terms from an uploaded contract, flags risks, and connects the result to the matter workflow, and custom extraction rules let a firm define the fields that matter to its own precedents rather than accepting a fixed schema. Extracted values become matter data that rules can then act on. Bulk review projects run the same extraction across many documents at once and export the resulting grid, which is how a firm audits a back catalogue of files instead of sampling it.

Automations carry the follow through. Trigger, condition and action rules handle the routine steps around a date, including generating a document as a workflow step, so a notice or a diary letter is produced rather than added to someone's task list. Matti, MatterFirst’s built-in AI assistant, answers from your matter information and prepares documents, client communications, tasks, dates and matter updates. Review and approve Matti’s proposed changes before they are applied.

Pricing is on a workspace base from A$199/month for Solo with one included user, extra-seat charges and a monthly AI allowance, and every paid plan includes the client portal, automations and a monthly AI balance denominated in Australian dollars. Deterministic work, such as generating a document from sections that use no AI, draws down nothing. See pricing and how the AI balance is metered. The application runs on Fly.io in Sydney. Database and backups are hosted on Fly.io Managed high-availability PostgreSQL clusters in Sydney. Documents are stored in Amazon Web Services S3 in Sydney. Document extraction and matter questions run on Amazon Web Services Bedrock in Australia, and reading a scanned document runs in Microsoft Azure's Australia East region. These locations describe the application, database, backups, document storage and document AI services. See the canonical security architecture for each service's scope.

How the products compare on this specific capability

Verified from each vendor's own public pages this session. "Not published" means the page reviewed did not state it, which is not the same as the product lacking it.

Clio's Australian pages returned 403 to automated requests during this review, so no cell has been filled from a secondary source. Check them yourself before relying on any comparison.

Who this suits, and who it does not

MatterFirst suits Australian firms of roughly two to twenty fee earners that want Australian document storage and document AI processing, state based trust accounting and date rules that show their working. It is a poor fit in three cases worth stating plainly.

Self-service today: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Xero, Stripe. Available through coordinated setup: PEXA, InfoTrack. Coordinated manual setup is arranged with MatterFirst and the provider. Confirm account requirements, connection scope and setup timing before rollout. Other catalogue entries retain their published setup status.

A checklist for evaluating any system on dates

1. Ask the vendor to show a limitation date being calculated from matter facts, not typed into a calendar.
2. Change the trigger fact in the demonstration and watch whether dependent dates move.
3. Ask what the system displays as the authority for the date.
4. Ask which jurisdictions the date rules cover, and get the list rather than a yes.
5. Ask how the system escalates an unacknowledged obligation, and to whom.
6. Ask what happens to calculated dates when a matter is migrated in from your current system.
7. Ask what the audit trail shows a regulator or an insurer after the fact.

The evaluation checklist covers the wider set of questions worth putting to any vendor, and firms moving off a legacy system can start with the migration assessment.

Frequently asked questions

Does MatterFirst calculate limitation dates automatically?

Yes. Rules calculate limitation and key dates from matter data and cite the governing statute beside the date, for example Limitation Act 1969 (NSW) s 14(1). The calculation is a control, not legal advice, and the solicitor still characterises when the cause of action accrued.

What is the limitation period for a simple contract claim in the Northern Territory?

Three years from accrual under s 12 of the Limitation Act 1981 (NT), rather than the six years that applies in the states and the ACT. Check the Act for extension and disability provisions before relying on it.

Does MatterFirst handle matters in every Australian state?

Matters can be recorded in all eight Australian jurisdictions. The trust accounting compliance review workflow is narrower and covers NSW, VIC, QLD and WA.

Can MatterFirst connect to PEXA or InfoTrack?

Self-service today: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Xero, Stripe. Available through coordinated setup: PEXA, InfoTrack. Coordinated manual setup is arranged with MatterFirst and the provider. Confirm account requirements, connection scope and setup timing before rollout. Documented REST API access and webhooks are included on Practice, Firm and Enterprise; Solo does not include API or webhook access. Public documentation is at API documentation and the developer guide. Trust-accounting endpoints are not exposed.

How much does MatterFirst cost?

Pricing is per workspace, from A$199/month for Solo with one included user, extra-seat charges and a monthly AI allowance, and additional users are charged on top of the plan. Each plan includes a monthly AI balance in Australian dollars that metered AI work draws down. The pricing page has the current figures for each plan.

Can I connect Claude or ChatGPT to our matter files?

MatterFirst provides an MCP server that lets a firm connect an approved AI assistant to its own workspace, with per connection permission profiles, Australian identifier masking and per tool approval. It is off until an administrator switches it on. The MCP documentation sets out the specifics.

Where to start

Pick your five highest risk matter types and write down, for each, the date that would end the firm if it were missed and the fact that date is derived from. That list is the specification. Any system worth buying should be able to compute every line on it from data already on the matter, tell you which provision it relied on, and move the date when the underlying fact moves.