Why nothing here is legal advice

The distinction, in one paragraph

Describing how a published procedure works is writing, and anyone may do it. Telling a particular person what to do about their own situation is legal work, and in Maine as elsewhere it is done by people admitted to a bar and answerable to a regulator for it. Plain Docket does the first and never the second.

What that rules out, concretely

This site does not say whether a refusal was lawful, whether a complaint is worth filing, whether a deadline has run, whether a decision can be appealed, or what a reader ought to do next. It does not read documents, assess facts, estimate outcomes or recommend anyone. It has no client and cannot acquire one, because it offers nothing that could be accepted.

What it does instead

It quotes the published rule and dates the reading. A reader who knows that a statute sets a five working day acknowledgement period, and can see the section number, is in a far better position than one who has been told what someone thinks the rule probably is. That is the whole ambition of the site, and it stops exactly there.

Why the notice is on every page

Because pages are read one at a time and arrive from search, not from the home page. A disclaimer that lives only in a footer of a page nobody opens is decoration. The notice at the foot of every page of this site is the same sentence, and it is there so that no single page can be mistaken, on its own, for something it is not.

Where a real answer comes from

From the body that published the procedure, which will answer questions about its own process, and from a licensed practitioner for anything that turns on a reader's own facts. The folio Where to look sets out which bodies publish what, and links no further than that.