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A client sits across from you with a story that is clearly a claim. The wrong done to them is obvious. What is not obvious, until you start doing arithmetic while they talk, is whether you can still bring it. That arithmetic has crept to the front of the intake meeting, and it is changing how careful firms open a file.
For years, limitation periods lived at the back of the practice. You confirmed the cause of action, took the retainer, and the clock was a box you ticked once the file was open. That order has flipped. The clock now shapes the first conversation, often before the merits get a look.
The Two Year Period and Its Provincial Variations
Most common law provinces settled on a basic two year limitation period, and that number has become a default assumption in a lot of lawyers' heads. The trouble is that the default is a starting point, not the answer. Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and others each built their own machinery around that two years, with different ultimate periods, different treatment of minors and persons under disability, and different carve outs for specific claim types.
Quebec runs on a civil law prescription regime that does not map cleanly onto the common law language at all. And scattered across every jurisdiction are special statutory periods that ignore the general act entirely: municipal notice requirements measured in days, claims against public authorities, defamation, certain professional matters. A file that looks like a straightforward two year claim can sit on a much shorter deadline nobody mentioned.
Warn. The general limitation period is rarely the whole story. Notice provisions and claim specific rules can shorten the deadline before the general clock even matters.
How Discoverability Keeps Shifting the Start Date
The reason intake got harder is discoverability. The clock does not start when the harm happens. It starts when a reasonable person in the claimant's position knew, or ought to have known, that they had a claim worth pursuing against an identifiable defendant. That sounds tidy on the page. In practice it is the most litigated question in this area, and the appellate courts keep tuning it. When did the client appreciate an injury was not trivial? When did they have enough to identify who was responsible? Each question can move the start date by months or years, and none is answered by the incident date the client gives.
The date on the incident report is a fact. The date the clock started is a legal conclusion, and it is yours to make. The intake reality
So you cannot take the client's timeline at face value. The honest answer to "when did you realize something was wrong" is often "it came to me slowly," and slowly is exactly the fact pattern where discoverability arguments live or die.
Why Intake Is Now a Limitations Screen
Put those two forces together, a patchwork of periods and a moving start date, and the intake meeting becomes a limitations screen whether you designed it that way or not. The firms handling this well have turned the deadline into a gating question, asked early and deliberately: a short set of standing prompts the intake person works through, not a form the client fills out.
- When did the event occur, and when did the client first suspect something was wrong?
- Is there a special notice period in play, against a municipality, public body, or regulated professional?
- Could the claimant have been a minor or under a disability at any relevant point?
- Is the potential defendant identifiable now, or is there a gap on who is responsible?
- Has anything been said or done that a court might read as the client knowing enough?
Answering those does not resolve the limitation question. It tells you how urgent the file is and how much room you have to investigate before you must protect the client's position. That is the real output of intake now: not a yes or no on the merits, but a read on time and the starting point for the litigation timeline.
Tip. Capture the discoverability facts in the client's own words at first contact, dated and saved. A contemporaneous note is far stronger evidence of what the client knew and when than a reconstruction two years later.
Diarizing for Deadlines You Cannot See Yet
Here is the uncomfortable part. If the start date is a legal conclusion that can shift, then the deadline you diarize is provisional. The safe practice most risk conscious firms have converged on is to diarize the earliest defensible date: assume the clock started at the first moment a court might plausibly find the client knew enough, and set your critical dates from there. If you later establish a later start, you have lost a few cautious weeks. If you diarize the generous date and a court picks the early one, you have missed a limitation period. That asymmetry is the whole argument for erring early.
Provisional deadlines and the reasoning behind each date need to live somewhere durable and shared, not in one lawyer's head. Tying limitation dates to the matter itself, so the reminder surfaces regardless of who touches the file, is the kind of routine setup that keeps a firm out of trouble. Whether you use A1 CMS or something else, the deadline belongs to the matter, not a person.
Where Firms Are Getting Caught Out
The patterns of failure are consistent enough to name. The most common is the assumed two year default applied to a claim that carried a shorter special period nobody checked. Close behind is the transferred or reopened file, diarized once and never revisited when new facts emerged. Then there is slow discoverability creep, where the earliest defensible start date quietly slides into range while everyone builds the case. And the classic: the consult that never became a retainer, where the firm assumed no duty ran and the client assumed someone was watching the clock.
None of this is new law. What is new is how much of it now has to happen at the front door, before the retainer is signed and often before you know whether the case is any good. Intake that treats the limitation question as the second thing you sort out, rather than the first, is running on borrowed time. Build the screen, diarize the earliest defensible date, write down what the client knew and when, and revisit those dates as the facts shift. See our family and civil practice writing for more. The claim you save will probably be one you never saw coming.
