How the record is kept

This page is the accuracy contract: what Docket Yard takes from the Board unchanged, the few things it derives, and the rules every derived thing is produced under. It is written from the same source the code is built from, and it changes when the code does.

Taken from the Board unchanged

Docket numbers, captions, filing types, filers as filed, deciding bodies, decision summaries, and dates. Each is the cell the Board printed, kept verbatim in the store. Captions and summaries appear in the Board's own capitals.
Dates are quoted, never computed. A sheet shows the date the Board printed, in a different format (25 Aug 2026 for 8/25/2026); the printed form is kept alongside it. No date is inferred from context, a document, or another date.
Files. Every attachment the Board lists is fetched once and kept by the SHA-256 of its bytes. If the Board later serves different bytes at the same address, the record keeps both and notes the replacement; subscribers are told.
Every response from the Board's search is kept raw, so the record can be rebuilt from what was actually received, and so a dispute about what the Board printed on a given day can be settled.

Derived, and how

The short type label in a sheet's second column (Motion, Reply, Notice, Comments, Decision…) is a fixed mapping from the Board's filing-type string. It looks only at that string — never at who filed, never at the document. A type the mapping does not know shows its first word.
Folding a docket family. A record the Board enters in both a docket and one of its sub-dockets is shown once, on the copy nearest the parent, with a note of where else it was entered. The sub-docket relationship comes from the docket number itself (FD 36873 (Sub-No. 1) belongs to FD 36873).
A repeated filer. The Board's "filed for" cell sometimes repeats one party several times over; the sheet shows the run once. The cell itself is untouched and appears in full on the entry's own page.
Order within a day. Entries sharing a date are shown decisions first, then by the Board's record id, descending. That is a stable order for reading, not a claim about the order things happened.
Alerts are built only from the record's own ledger of new entries, only for entries observed after a subscription was confirmed, and only from the watch — never from history being back-filled. See the delivery promise on the coverage page.

Never inferred

A party's position. Nothing here says what anyone argued or supports. If that is ever derived, it will come from the document's own words, carry the method and version that produced it and a link to the passage, and a procedural filing will take no position regardless of who filed it.
Significance. Entries are not ranked or weighted.
Outcomes and deadlines. Not computed from anything.

Provenance

Every entry points at the capture it was observed in, and every capture at the raw response. Where a derived claim is ever published, it carries the source document, the location in it, the method and its version, when it was produced, and a confidence — and a later method does not overwrite an earlier claim; it supersedes it, and the earlier one stays on record.

Known failure modes

The Board's search returns a full unfiltered result set, with a success code, when a filter is passed the wrong way; and an identical "no results" envelope for a real empty result, an expired session token, and a page past the end. The pipeline positively checks that every response matches what it asked for, and refuses to ingest what it cannot prove. A refused page is kept raw and reported to the operator; it is never silently treated as empty.
The search shows at most 10,000 rows per query. No single docket prefix reaches it today; the watch window is a week, far below it.
A filing the Board back-dates into a day already watched is caught by the overlap between passes, and alerted as new when the record first sees it.
What the pipeline cannot see, it cannot record: entries the Board's search itself does not list are not here.