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Docket

Cases and enforcement

Tier: Motion · Requirement module: Case Management · Status: ⬜ Not started

Purpose

A docket is the register of matters before a court. This engine holds supervisory matters: a breach recorded, investigated, evidenced, reviewed by legal, escalated to a directive or penalty recommendation, and closed.

Docket is where supervision becomes enforcement, which makes it the engine with the highest evidential burden in the platform. Everything it holds may end up in a hearing.

Scope

Capability Status Notes
Breach record ⬜ Opened from Bench, from a threshold alert, or manually
Investigation plan ⬜ Steps, owners, target dates
Evidence bundle ⬜ Immutable references to submissions, validation results, correspondence
Legal review ⬜ Legal opinion recorded as a case stage
Penalty recommendation ⬜ Computed from Cadence hooks and case facts — a recommendation only
Directive tracking ⬜ Directives issued, compliance deadlines, evidence of compliance
Settlement or closure ⬜ Outcome, reasons, closure approval
Management reporting ⬜ Case ageing and outcome statistics via Projections

Case lifecycle

OPENED ──► INVESTIGATING ──► LEGAL_REVIEW ──► DECISION ──┬──► DIRECTIVE_ISSUED ──► MONITORING ──► CLOSED
   │              │                                       │
   │              └──► CLOSED_NO_ACTION                   ├──► PENALTY_RECOMMENDED ──► CLOSED
   │                                                      │
   └──► MERGED (into a related case)                       └──► SETTLED ──► CLOSED

Each transition requires an actor, a reason, and where the stage demands it, an approval. Closure above a materiality threshold requires a second approver — the same structural four-eyes principle Bench applies to approval.

The evidence bundle

The bundle is the reason this engine cannot be a ticket tracker.

  • Evidence is referenced, never copied. A bundle points at submission version v1.0 in Strata, at validation result V07, at query Q-1. Because those are immutable, the bundle cannot rot.
  • Every reference records the hash of what it pointed at, so the bundle can prove the evidence is unchanged since it was gathered.
  • Documents added to a case are content-addressed and checksummed like any attachment.
  • The bundle is exportable as a sealed pack with a manifest of hashes — the artefact handed to legal counsel.

Penalties: recommendation, never automatic

The requirement calls for configurable penalty parameters and calculation hooks. Kovent computes a recommendation and stops.

The reasons are deliberate:

  • Penalties are creatures of statute; the arithmetic is jurisdiction-specific and contestable
  • An automatically issued penalty is an administrative act taken by software, which a firm will challenge on process grounds before it argues the merits
  • The supervisor's discretion is part of the legal framework, not a gap to be automated away

So Kovent shows the computation, the parameters used, and the facts relied on. A human issues.

Owns

  • Cases, their stages, and transitions
  • Investigation plans and findings
  • Evidence bundles and their manifests
  • Directives issued and compliance monitoring
  • Penalty recommendations and their inputs
  • Closure decisions and approvals

Does not own

  • The evidence itself — Strata, Assay, Bench
  • Risk scores, though an open case is a driver into Prism
  • The audit chain — Seal

Open questions

  • Thematic and inspection work. The requirement mentions thematic reviews and inspection plans. These are supervisory matters that are not breaches and may need a second case kind rather than bending the breach lifecycle.
  • Multi-firm cases. A market-wide issue implicates many firms in one matter. Whether that is one case with many respondents or many linked cases changes the data model materially.
  • Statutory clocks. Enforcement steps often carry legal time limits. These belong in Cadence as a different obligation kind rather than being reimplemented here.