About
About Plain Docket, and what it is not
A collective desk, one address, and a distinction this page exists to make impossible to misread.
What Plain Docket is
An independent reference publication in plain English about the public legal record in Maine: what a public record is and how a request for one proceeds, what a state human rights commission does with a complaint, what a professional licensing board publishes, how a written decision is assembled, and how the courts are arranged. It is written by a collective desk, which signs "The Plain Docket desk". There are no individual bylines because there are none, not because they are hidden.
What Plain Docket is not
It is not a law firm. It is not a lawyer. Nobody here is admitted to the bar of Maine or of anywhere else, and nothing on this site is legal advice. It is not affiliated with any court, agency, commission, board, bar association or law practice, and it continues no earlier practice of any kind.
It follows that this site has no client, takes no case, reviews no document, quotes no fee, keeps no appointment book and makes no referral to any named professional. There is no contact form anywhere on it. A page that describes how a procedure works is not a service, and this one is careful never to behave like one.
How it is written
Every deadline, fee, statutory citation and quoted phrase on this site is taken from a named published source, and the text says which source and on what date it was read. Where a source is silent, the text says the source is silent instead of supplying a plausible number. Where two sources differ, both are given. The illustrations are illustrative compositions produced for this site; they document no real place, document or person, and each caption says so.
Why this address
The domain name was registered again in 2026, after it had been dropped and left unused. Before that it belonged, from at least 2006, to a law practice in Maine that had been founded in 1945; that practice merged into another firm with effect from July 1, 2014, the address remained in use until about 2017, and the original entity was dissolved that year. Plain Docket has no connection whatever with that practice, with the firm that acquired it, or with any person who worked at either, and it is not a successor to either. None of the old pages have been republished. The former addresses that still receive links are sent to the page of this publication that covers the same subject, when one exists; no page that named an individual person has been republished, which is the only correct answer when the people concerned are alive and still working.
Corrections
Errors of fact are worth reporting and are the only thing this desk can usefully act on: a wrong date, a superseded figure, a citation that no longer matches the text, a broken link. The address is [email protected]. A report that names its source is dealt with first, because it is the only kind that can be checked without redoing the work. The desk cannot answer questions about anyone's own situation, and will not try.
The three pages that complete this one
The single most important line on this site has a page of its own: what it means that none of this is legal advice, and what a reader is expected to do with a reference page instead. What this site collects about a visitor, which is close to nothing, is set out in the privacy notice. Who publishes, under what terms the text may be reused, and where the responsibility for an error sits, are in the legal notice.