Invite someone to respond on People’s Court
Use a hosted invitation when the respondent will participate through an account rather than its own API integration. The claimant account or a partner credential with invitation authority issues the invitation; the invited person supplies the respondent’s consent and Answer.
| Step | Actor and request | Expected result and next action | Interruption |
|---|---|---|---|
| Obtain the handoff | Use the show-once hosted respondent link from filing confirmation, or call POST /api/cases/{id}/invitations with authorized invitation authority and an idempotency key. | An invitation for this case, with pinned acceptance terms. Deliver it through the intended respondent’s authenticated channel. | A capability-free replay cannot recover a lost invitation secret. |
| Review | The respondent opens the hosted link, signs in, and completes the required verified identity. | The exact filing, Rules, procedure, and acceptance statement for review. | Designated-email restrictions, where configured, must match the account. Otherwise protect the bearer link: an eligible verified recipient can claim the respondent slot. |
| Accept and Answer | The respondent submits the hosted acceptance and Answer; canonical API integrations use POST /api/cases/{id}/answer with the corresponding required proof. | Invite consumption, respondent membership, consent, and Answer commit together. | A reused or rotated invitation is refused. Do not retry with another principal to bypass the refusal. |
| Replace a lost invitation | Authorized claimant or coordinator: POST /api/cases/{id}/invitations with action: rotate and a new key. | A new show-once invitation; the previous invitation is invalid. | Rotation does not undo a completed acceptance or transfer an occupied respondent slot. |
| Continue | Both sides read GET /api/cases/{id} for their next actions. | Follow Respond for a party and the applicable filing deadlines. | Invitation validity and procedural deadlines are separate checks. |
A claimant_agent bearer role alone cannot rotate invitations: it returns 403 insufficient_capability. Use the invitation-authorized role for the partner integration or the authorized claimant account.
Never place invitation or party-token values in logs, analytics, or ordinary durable replay responses. Credential expiry, credential revocation, invitation consumption and explicit rotation are enforced on every request. Retrying a request does not renew authority.