Capabilities
Nine modules on one case record.
One shared case database carries every representation matter: pre-grievance Article 8 problem solving, grievances, discipline defense, and pre-arbitration review through arbitration referral. Deadlines compute from your collective bargaining agreement, filings quote the contract verbatim, and every citation is verified against source text before it can be filed. Configured to your agreement and deployed per region.
Grievance case management
Cases live in email, shared drives, and individual notebooks, and no one can say at a glance what is open, what stage it sits at, or what is due next. Article9 holds every grievance in one record: the issue, the articles cited, the documents, the stage, and the next deadline. A representative opens a case and sees its whole history; a region opens the tracker and sees them all.
- Elevate a case from Step 1 to Step 2, or on to pre-arbitration review, individually or in bulk; the next stage's deadlines generate automatically.
- Outcomes track on two axes, the violation finding and the remedy, so a case the agency conceded but counter-offered stays visible and eligible for elevation instead of reading as won.
- Bulk PDF intake parses scanned grievances, pre-fills case data with per-field confidence, and holds every field for human confirmation, so years of paper files come in quickly.
- Uploading a management response parses the outcome and response date, updates the case, and records exactly how many days late the agency answered.
- Closed cases archive with full-text search, and sustained or settled cases promote into a permanent decisions library.
Deadline engine
Grievance timelines are unforgiving; a step filed a day late is lost on procedure, whatever its merit. The engine computes every filing and response window from the agreement's actual day counts, and each deadline carries the contract citation that created it.
- Written extensions are first-class records that preserve the original due date, the chain of prior extensions, who granted each one, and notes, so a timeline is never ambiguous in a dispute.
- The platform emails the responsible management official five days before a response is due and again on the day, from the facility's own address, and stores the exact message sent as proof of notice, exportable as a PDF.
- Urgent and overdue deadlines roll up to facility and regional dashboards and a cross-case deadlines view, so no step lapses because someone lost count.
Article 8 matters
Most problems should be settled before they become grievances, and the agreement gives you a track for that. An Article 8 matter is its own record with its own number, folder, documents, and clock: the representative drafts the notice against the orders and agreements they select, sends it from the facility's own mailbox, and the matter moves from open to notice sent, awaiting response, and response received.
- Management's answer is uploaded and reduced to its essence on the record, so the file says plainly whether the matter resolved or is grievable.
- A matter-level case analysis drafts from the record and the reference library, then stays editable by the representative who owns the case.
- Grieving is one action: the resulting grievance opens at Step 1 or Step 2 with the matter's narrative, parties, articles, and documents already carried over, and the two records stay linked in both directions.
- A matter that resolves closes as resolved rather than disappearing, so the facility keeps the record of what it fixed without filing.
Drafting with verified citations
A representative describes what happened in plain English. Article9 identifies the management action, narrows the agreement to the provisions that apply, reads their full text, and produces a filing-ready grievance that quotes exact contract language, then generates a signed PDF and emails it to management in one flow.
- Every quoted passage is checked verbatim against stored source text before it can reach a filable document; anything that cannot be matched is held back and clearly labeled as unverified.
- Rules Lookup answers plain-language questions about what management may and may not do, with a clear verdict grounded in your local agreements, agency directives, and the CBA; one click turns an answer into a grievance draft.
- Your collective bargaining agreement is stored verbatim, so drafts quote the contract itself rather than a paraphrase of it.
- Standing case briefs regenerate within minutes of any document or record change, so every active discipline matter and pre-arbitration case carries a current, citation-verified brief.
Discipline defense
A stepped workspace guides the representative from the proposal letter through the information demand, evidence production, the employee statement and reply, and the final decision, with parsing and drafting help at each step and reply deadlines tracked with extensions.
- A demand-match grid tracks what was demanded against what the agency produced, never provided, withheld until after the reply, or delivered deficient, building the procedural-violation record automatically.
- Notice and reply window violations are asserted by date arithmetic in code, never by inference; the twelve Douglas factors are presented as a representative's checklist and are deliberately never auto-scored.
- Enclosures are classified as they arrive, so the evidence file is organized by what each document is rather than by when someone happened to upload it.
Pre-arbitration review
Regions run the whole pre-arbitration program inside Article9: quarterly dockets, session scheduling with neutrals and attendees, presenter assignment, abeyance holds, and consolidation of related grievances under a lead case that decides once for the whole group.
- Presentation decks compile per session and export to PowerPoint, with every contract quote verified against source text before it ships.
- Internal case analysis stays separate from the evaluator-facing argument, so strategy about what to concede never appears in front of a neutral.
- Precedent memos compare each case against the region's decisions archive, and win-rate scorecards break outcomes down by article and by individual neutral.
Referral packages
A decided case that goes forward has to leave the platform as something a reviewer, an attorney, or national staff can actually read. Article9 assembles the whole referral as one organized archive: a cover letter on your letterhead, a numbered table of contents, then a tab per case holding the case analysis, the argument, and every original document in filing order.
- Exhibit numbering is stable and printed in the table of contents, so everyone in a review can say "tab 3, exhibit 2" and be looking at the same page.
- A document with no bytes behind it is listed as missing in the contents and the manifest rather than quietly dropped, so nobody assumes a record is complete when it is not.
- Scanned case files do not compress, and a real referral usually exceeds what mail providers accept, so delivery can be a tokenized download link that expires, counts downloads, and can be revoked; reviewers and outside counsel need no platform account.
- The link stores the package definition rather than the bytes, so the archive rebuilds on download and always reflects the current record.
Legal research
A representative describes a workplace situation once, and Article9 sweeps CourtListener, FLRA decisions back to 1979, a mirrored corpus of roughly 28,000 MSPB decisions, and the region's own precedent, ranking results by similarity with plain-language summaries.
- Internal precedent search covers historical pre-arbitration decisions and past grievances, and redacts personal names for users outside the case's facility.
- Curated authorities carry explicit verification flags, and research results attach to the specific case and the procedural defect they support.
- Per-facility libraries of local agreements and agency directives are OCR processed and indexed by meaning, so questions match the right sections without needing exact keywords.
Regional analytics
Agency timeliness becomes hard numbers. Article9 records how many days late each response arrived, averages it per facility, and rolls outcomes, most-violated articles, and response times up to a regional view for the RVP and the LR team.
- A per-facility roster of management officials shows each official's grievance count and outcome history.
- A regional accountability index flags repeat offending managers.
- Facility breakdowns show where cases concentrate, which articles are cited most, and where responses run latest.
Article9 platform
Every module runs on the same foundation: the accounts, the access rules, the audit trail, and the document store. It is always part of a subscription, because the case record is what the modules write to.
- Role-based access scopes every view, from facility representatives to regional LR tiers and the RVP. Regional staff can work inside any facility with a visible acting badge.
- Every login, edit, send, and deletion writes to an audit trail with user, facility, and IP.
- Each facility sends official filings and reminders from its own union mailbox, auto-signed with the representative's name and stored signature.
- Uploaded documents store durably in PostgreSQL and survive redeploys.
- On a phone the app becomes a five-tab experience, so the week's deadlines are visible from the facility floor.