A dismissal for absences in Mexico: the employer's proof, run with Claira

Autopartes Meseta, S.A. de C.V., a fictional parts maker with a plant in Querétaro, dismissed a shift supervisor, Lucía Ferrán, for having more than three absences in thirty days without permission or justified cause, a ground for rescission in article 47 of the Ley Federal del Trabajo. She has sued in the labour court for unjustified dismissal, saying her manager approved the days off in WhatsApp messages and nobody gave her a written notice. We act for the company.

Where the facts are disputed, article 784 places on the employer the proof of the worker's absences, the cause of rescission and the written notice of the date and cause of dismissal. Article 47 requires that notice to be handed to the worker at dismissal or communicated to the court within five business days, and without it the dismissal is presumed unjustified unless the employer proves otherwise. Article 804 obliges the employer to keep and exhibit attendance records and payroll. The defence therefore rests on the company's own records, and the first task is to learn what they hold.

The collection in Nuix Discover holds the supervisor's HR file, time clock exports, scanned paper attendance sheets from weeks when the clock was out of service, payroll receipts, the mailboxes of her manager and of HR, WhatsApp chats exported from the manager's company phone with their voice notes, and a recording of the meeting at which she was dismissed.

Early case assessment opens from the Claira menu under More. It reads metadata only and reports volume, people, date coverage and suggested segments, with a PDF for the file. Date coverage matters most here. Every day of the thirty-day window should be covered by a clock export or a sheet, and a week with neither is a gap the company must close with other evidence, since article 784 provides that losing such documents by accident or force majeure does not relieve the employer of proving its case by other means.

The team starts a Case Context from the Employment template and generates it from five key documents: the claim, the company's answer, the employment contract, the scanned notice of rescission and the meeting recording. Claira reads native files, so the scan and the recording can feed the context, and each line drawn from a document carries a source number back to it. A partner approves the result.

Case Context is not sent with a scan, so the review prompt carries the facts itself: the names, the disputed dates and the ground the company relied on. With Multi-Code, one pass fills several fields: the document's date, whether it records the supervisor present or absent, and any excerpt mentioning permission for an absence or delivery of the notice, with N/A where there is none. The team tests it with Scan Document on a clock export, a scanned sheet, a chat and a voice note.

A bulk scan runs the final version of the prompt across the review set. With Scan as left on Auto, Claira picks the mode for each document, so scanned sheets can be read as images and the voice notes and the meeting recording as audio. That matters in this file, because text mode cannot read scanned pages that were never OCR'd, and the paper sheets hold the disputed weeks.

The team ticks the option to write the prompt to each document's Prompt Log, so each result can be traced to its instructions, and sends a run with this much media to background processing where it is configured, so it carries on after the browser closes. Results land in the connected Nuix Discover fields as the run progresses, beside the reviewers' own coding, and the task records which prompt version it ran.

The Bulk Tasks tab shows how many documents succeeded, failed or were skipped. A skipped document usually lacks readable text, and damaged or password-protected files are skipped with a note. In most reviews a stray skip goes to a reviewer. Here each skipped attendance sheet may be a day the company cannot prove, so the team rescans those sheets with different settings or reads them by hand, and lists the days that remain unsupported.

The permission field gets the closest reading, because it holds the worker's case. Every document with an excerpt there goes to a lawyer, and a reviewer samples the N/A results for messages that grant leave in words the prompt did not foresee. Reviewers record agreement in their own fields and leave Claira's results as written. A disagreement that repeats becomes the next revision of the prompt, tested again before it runs.

With the fields checked, the team switches to Insights, opens the chronology template from Quickstart, chooses the bulk task as the source and asks for a table with one row per working day in the window: the clock or sheet entry for the supervisor, any message about permission, any mention of the notice, and the documents behind each entry. Insights reads the fields as they stand when the team clicks Generate Insight, so corrections made since the scan are included.

Shown as a timeline, the table groups events by date, lets the team filter by the people named and flags events whose sources disagree on the date. Each citation opens its source in the document list, so a day where the clock records an absence and the manager's chat records an agreed rest day can be read side by side. A lawyer checks every row against its sources before the table is relied on.

Claira can set the records side by side, and the judgements that follow stay with the lawyers. The first is whether a manager's informal reply in a chat counts as the employer's permission, which decides whether those days count toward the more than three absences in thirty days that article 47 requires.

The second is the notice. If the file holds no acknowledgement signed by the supervisor and no record of communication to the court within five business days, the presumption in article 47 applies, and the company must prove the dismissal was justified despite it.

The third is commercial. If the chronology leaves the company short of four unexcused absences supported by its own records, the partner may advise the client to settle. That advice, and the evidence the company offers, belong to the people who sign the pleadings.

The Insight exports to Word for the memo to the client, to Excel with a sheet per table and document IDs ready to search in Nuix Discover, and to PDF with live citation links. The Excel version becomes the working tool for preparing the company's offer of evidence, because every row points back to the clock export, sheet, message or recording it came from, and it is those documents the company will put before the court.

Beside it the team keeps a record of how the review was run: the Bulk Task History Report from the Bulk Tasks tab, the prompt's version history downloaded from Prompt History, the approved Case Context and the early case assessment PDF. If the worker's counsel questions how the attendance record was assembled, the company can show the instructions used, the version that ran and the checks its reviewers made.