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Running a law firm's hearings on two calendars without losing a date
Published 7 September 202625 Rabiʻ I 1448 AH5 min read
In short
The courts and Najiz set their dates in the Hijri calendar, following Umm al-Qura, while your contracts and corporate clients work in Gregorian. The answer is not for the team to memorise conversions. It is to record every date once, in the calendar it arrived in, so it shows in both automatically, and to count deadlines from the date the court set, not from the hearing date.
Where the mistakes actually happen
Few firms miss a date because they never knew about it. Most lose it between two calendars.
- A notification arrives from Najiz with a Hijri date; an employee converts it in their head or on a website and types it into a phone calendar. A one-day conversion error is enough.
- The client asks when the hearing is and gets a Gregorian date that was converted once, then converted again when entered into the client's own calendar.
- A 30-day period is counted on a Gregorian calendar from a Hijri date, or the reverse, and gains or loses a day at the turn of a month.
- The Hijri year begins in the middle of the Gregorian year, so a file opened in Muharram gets the wrong year written on it.
- The hearing sits only in the lawyer's personal calendar, so when they are away or leave the firm, the date leaves with them.
What everyone in the office should know about the Hijri calendar
Nobody needs to be an astronomer, but five facts prevent most of the errors:
- Saudi Arabia's official calendar is Umm al-Qura, a pre-computed calendar that government bodies and Najiz use for dates and transactions.
- A Hijri year is 354 or 355 days, about 11 days shorter than a Gregorian year, so the same Hijri date falls roughly eleven days earlier in the Gregorian calendar each year.
- A Hijri month is 29 or 30 days, and you cannot tell which from its name. “In a month” is not a deadline; deadlines are counted in days.
- Statutory periods are mostly counted in days, so the calendar does not change their length, but a conversion error changes their start date.
- Some periods are in working days, not calendar days: labour amicable settlement, for example, runs 21 working days, and the Saudi working week is Sunday to Thursday.
One rule solves most of it: record the date once, in the calendar it arrived in
A Najiz notification is recorded with its Hijri date as received; a corporate client's meeting is recorded in Gregorian as they sent it. The system or the calendar shows the other date, not the employee. Every manual conversion is a chance for error, and every copy from one calendar to another is a second one.
If the firm is still on an ordinary calendar, the minimum is to write both dates in the event's title itself, such as “Hearing 15/03/1448 AH, 15 Sep 2026”, and to keep one source.
How to organise the firm's calendar
- 01
One calendar for the firm, not one per lawyer
Hearings belong to the case, not to the lawyer. A shared calendar the partner and the assistant can see means one person's absence is not the date's absence.
- 02
Only three kinds of event
A hearing, a deadline, a meeting. A hearing carries the court, circuit, courtroom and case number. A deadline carries the stage it belongs to and the date the count starts. A meeting carries the client.
- 03
Every event attached to a case
An event without a case is lost when you search. Opening the case should show its past and coming hearings; opening the day should show which case.
- 04
A reminder a week before and a day before
The first to prepare the memorandum and documents, the second to attend. A single reminder an hour before helps nobody.
- 05
The Sunday review
A short meeting at the start of the week that goes through this week's hearings and the next two weeks' deadlines. Ten minutes catches the forgotten date before it passes.
- 06
Straight after the hearing
The lawyer records the outcome and the next date the same day, before the Najiz notification arrives. The notification confirms what was recorded; it should never be the first the firm hears of the date.
What a complete hearing record carries
| Field | Why |
|---|---|
| The date in both Hijri and Gregorian | So the client and the court each read it in their own calendar |
| Time, court, circuit and courtroom | Ten in the morning at the Labour Court is not the same hearing at the Commercial Court |
| The court's case number and the internal one | Staff search by one or the other on the day |
| The attending lawyer and their substitute | So attendance does not fail on one absence |
| What to prepare | A memorandum, an original document, a witness |
| Outcome and next date | Written the same day, after the hearing |
Common questions
- Are court dates always in Hijri?
- Notifications and deeds in Najiz carry the Hijri date per Umm al-Qura, and many show the Gregorian beside it. Record what the notification says as it is, and let the calendar show the equivalent.
- Can we rely on online date converters?
- Converters built on Umm al-Qura are accurate. The problem is not the conversion but the retyping after it: every time a date is moved between calendars by hand, there is a chance of a one-day or one-month error.
- How do I count the 30-day appeal period?
- It starts from the date the court set for receiving the judgment copy and is counted in days, not months. If the last day falls on an official holiday, the period extends to the first working day after it. Record both the start and the end date in the case file.
- Should Hijri dates be written in numerals or words?
- What matters is that it cannot be misread. The safest form in correspondence is day, month by name, and year, such as 15 Rabi' al-Awwal 1448 AH, because 03/15/1448 can be read in two different orders.
This guide is a general explanation of established procedure, not legal advice. Check the current text of the law, or a qualified lawyer, before acting on a specific case.
How the calendar works in QanoonTech
Every date in QanoonTech is written in Hijri and Gregorian together, in the calendar and in every date field on a case, a document or a task, with no manual conversion. A hearing is created from the case file, carries the court, courtroom and case number, and appears in the firm's shared calendar according to each user's access. The week view brings the firm's hearings and deadlines onto one screen for the Sunday review.
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