September 17, 2026

Restraining-order forms, filled from the matter and safe to serve

Cedent fills California domestic-violence restraining-order forms from a matter, the same way it already fills the income and asset declarations.

Create the matter as a restraining order and the form picker offers the four Tier A forms: DV-100 (the abuse described and the orders your client is asking for), CLETS-001 (identifiers for the police database), DV-109 (notice of court hearing) and DV-110 (the temporary orders). The picker now fits the matter — a divorce matter no longer lists restraining-order forms, and a restraining-order matter no longer lists the asset schedule.

These four are filed together, so Generate → DV packet drafts all four at once and opens DV-100 first. None of them can be marked final until all four exist, because the clerk receives them as one set.

Three things work differently here than on the financial forms, and each is a safety decision rather than a convenience.

The protected person’s address doesn’t print on a form that gets served. DV-100 is handed to the person being restrained. Your client’s address, phone and email are therefore left off it — but you can still see what Cedent found in those fields, check it, and correct it. What you can’t do by accident is put it on the served copy. A card at the top of the form records the decision for the whole matter: withhold, use a safe mailing address (your office, a box, a Safe at Home address), or print your client’s own details. Change it and the open drafts re-fill to match; the card names who decided and when.

CLETS-001 is never served. It goes to the clerk and to law enforcement, so it does carry your client’s details. It’s marked Do not serve in your drafts and carries a warning at the top of the form — keep it out of the packet you hand the process server.

The abuse description is quoted, not composed. When Cedent gathers the narrative from the matter’s documents it is instructed to quote or closely paraphrase what a document actually says, and to leave a field empty rather than estimate a date or describe an injury nothing supports. Because the declaration is signed under penalty of perjury, each incident field carries an Accept as written button, and DV-100 can’t be marked final until you’ve accepted or edited every one. Confirming the form as a whole isn’t enough on its own.

The orders requested stay yours. Cedent never ticks a request for an order. Which orders to ask for is your client’s decision, so those boxes start empty.

On DV-109 and DV-110 most of the form belongs to the court — the clerk sets the hearing, the judge decides the orders. Those fields sit in a collapsed The court completes this section and don’t count against you, so a form you’ve finished your part of reads as complete instead of stranded at half full.

Set your firm's timezone, and your own

Anything Cedent sends on a schedule — your daily brief, a hearing packet — fired on Pacific time, because that’s where the first firms were. That was a constant in the code rather than a setting.

It’s a setting now, in two places.

Settings → Firm Profile has a Timezone for the firm. Leave it unset and Cedent falls back to the court timezone of the matter’s jurisdiction.

Settings → My Profile has your own, which reads “Use firm setting” and names the firm’s zone, so you can see what you’d be inheriting before you override it. Set it only if your day runs on a different clock from the rest of the firm.

Changing either one reschedules what’s already queued, so a brief you receive at 7am keeps arriving at 7am where you now are, instead of at 7am somewhere else until the next send corrects itself.

Nothing changes for firms already working in Pacific time — that’s what your firm timezone is set to.

Attachments arrive with the email, even when the mail provider pushes back

When you connect a mailbox, Cedent imports the history behind it. Mail providers push back when you ask for a lot at once — and Cedent wasn’t handling that.

A slowed-down request for an email’s attachments came back looking exactly like an email that had no attachments. So the message imported, the files didn’t, and nothing anywhere said a file was missing. The email simply looked complete. Once that had happened there was no second attempt, because the email was already imported.

Cedent now waits and asks again when a provider pushes back, and if it still can’t collect a file it records that against the email instead of showing you a message that looks whole. A gap you can see is recoverable; one you can’t isn’t.

Imports are also faster. Cedent works through several conversations at a time rather than one message after another, and an archive attachment with dozens of files inside it is now unpacked in a couple of passes rather than two for every file. A mailbox that used to take an afternoon finishes noticeably sooner.

If you connected a mailbox before today and an email looks like it’s missing an attachment you know it had, disconnect and reconnect that mailbox to re-import the affected window.

The document you attach in chat is the one Cedent reads

This one is worth reading if you attach documents to chat.

When you attached a file and sent your question immediately, the upload finished before the text inside it had been extracted. Cedent was told the file was your primary evidence but couldn’t find it — and rather than saying so, it searched for something with a similar name, found a near match, and answered from that. The answer didn’t mention the substitution. In one case it compared two documents and reported them as substantively identical when it had never opened one of them.

If you asked about an attached document and got an answer that described something else, that is the explanation.

What changed. Every file you attach is now checked before Cedent does any work: that it belongs to this matter, that it hasn’t been deleted or excluded from context, and that its text is actually readable yet. Files mentioned with @ go through the same check, which they never did before.

If a file isn’t ready, Cedent says so in the first line of its answer, names the file, and tells you what to do about it — then answers only what the rest of the matter supports. A short answer that names what’s missing is worth more than a confident one built on the wrong document.

It also waits for an ordinary upload to finish rather than pressing ahead: the composer names the file still being read and holds Send until it’s ready. A slow file is disclosed rather than waited on indefinitely.