Some judges have an annoying tendency to issue orders that effectively change the local rules as they apply to one particular case. For any legal secretary with more than one case on her list, this is a recipe for docketing disaster.

In one of my (federal) cases, the judge entered an order early in the litigation that all responses to non-dispositive motions be filed a full 10 days earlier than either the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the district local rules require.

Now, I ask you: How, when I’m calendaring for 10 or 12 active cases, am I supposed to remember that a single judge has imposed an arbitrary, shorter deadline for responses to non-dispositives? Almost any reminder system I might employ for this would require me to look in a place where I normally would never look when calendaring. It’s not in the FRCP. It’s not in the district local rules. It’s not in the notice of filing. It’s not on my radar screen.

Sure, I could paste yet another note on my computer monitor. But within about five minutes of my pasting them up, those notes become nothing more than wallpaper. Did I mention that I cannot, as I sit here in my home office, tell you what color the walls in my law office are?

Here’s where my Outlook docketing templates save me with passive reminders. In my template for The Case of the Impatient Judge [cue Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys theme music], I inserted a note in bold text explaining that shorter response deadline. Thus, every time I start a calendar entry in that case, I am reminded of the right way to calculate a response date. This little failsafe has saved my ass a couple of times already.

A side benefit to this system is that everyone who receives that docket entry, and who might also have forgotten about the judge’s impatience, can see — without having to pester me — why I calendared it much sooner than they expected.

Not that they won’t pester me, of course, because they can’t be bothered to actually open the appointment and read it. But when they do pester me, I’ll be consoled by my smugness at knowing they had no business pestering me.

Need help creating Outlook templates for your docketing needs? Well . . . I’ve written about creating e-mail templates, and the process is identical except that you start with an appointment rather than an e-mail. I’ve also blogged about ways to tweak your docket entries and take some of the drudgery out of the process.