What it is
The WARN Act requires employers to give 60 days' notice before a mass layoff. Every filing contains two dates: when notice was given, and when the layoff takes effect. Short-Notice subtracts one from the other, at sites with 50 or more affected workers, and surfaces every filing where that interval comes in under 60 days.
This is not a tip or a lead that a layoff happened somewhere. It's a read of the employer's own paperwork, filed with the state, showing a shorter interval than the statute calls for. The product doesn't infer anything from missing documents — it reads the documents that exist and does the subtraction.
Each candidate arrives identified: employer, county, affected-worker count, notice date, effective date, and the exact shortfall against 60 days. CA and NY are the states currently covered. Over the last 12 months the pipeline has surfaced 121 candidates — roughly ten a month — and 250 over the last 24 months for firms working a longer look-back. Four of the current largest, by affected-worker count, show shortfalls like 34 days, 1 day, 33 days, and 1 day short of the 60-day requirement, at sites with 725, 411, 390, and 329 workers respectively. Employer names are withheld in examples; attaching a company publicly to a possible statutory shortfall isn't something Kcalbin does before that company has been heard.
Pricing is flat. A single candidate is $395 one-time, delivered with the employer and county (with FIPS), the worker count, both dates, the exact shortfall, and a link to the state source record. The monthly feed, Short-Notice Intelligence, is $795/mo and delivers every candidate as it's detected, with no per-filing decision to make. Kcalbin doesn't take a share of any settlement or case outcome — there's no pricing structure that would let it.
What it does not do
This is a screening signal, not a legal conclusion. A short interval is a reason to look, not a finding that anyone violated the law. The WARN Act has real statutory exceptions that can lawfully shorten or excuse the 60-day notice — the faltering-company exception, unforeseeable business circumstances, and natural disaster, under 29 U.S.C. § 2102(b). Short-Notice doesn't know which of these might apply to a given filing. It reads two dates and computes a gap; it does not evaluate whether that gap was lawful.
It also doesn't claim coverage it doesn't have. Right now that means CA and NY — not a national picture, because Kcalbin doesn't have a national pipeline yet. If your interest is a state outside that list, this product has nothing for you yet.
It isn't legal advice, and it isn't a prediction about what any particular employer did or will do. Kcalbin is not a law firm, and nothing in the candidate record substitutes for someone actually reviewing the filing and the circumstances behind it. The product hands you the dates and the arithmetic; what you do with that — whether you escalate, investigate, or set it aside — is a judgment call outside what the data can make for you.
Filings can also be amended after the fact, which is part of why coverage is continuous rather than a one-time pull: a filing that's quietly updated, or appears late, re-enters the queue without anyone needing to remember to check. But continuous monitoring doesn't mean complete monitoring — it means filings are re-read on a schedule, not that every possible shortfall anywhere is guaranteed to surface.
In short
Short-Notice is a narrow tool built around one calculation: the interval between two dates on a WARN filing, compared against a 60-day statutory requirement, at sites large enough to matter. It tells you where that arithmetic comes up short, with the source record attached so you can check it yourself. It does not tell you why the interval is short, whether an exception applies, or what happens next. For a business reader deciding whether a filing is worth a closer look, that's the entire value of it: dates, subtraction, and a link — not a verdict.