Legal Services │ Service Design

Making Case Management Work for the Judiciary System

Wovenware delivers a better case management system to better document and manage court system workloads.

“Wovenware applies human-centric design to reimagine a state court system’s case management solution and provide the necessary capabilities and insights to facilitate the justice process for everyone.”

Identifying opportunities together

Every day the courts are overwhelmed with huge caseloads and the corresponding documentation required. The time it takes to effectively manage caseloads and handle the required documentation was impeding the judiciary system’s ability to provide swift and timely justice. Further, outdated processes and systems increased the problem and added greater complexity and frustrations.

This major state judicial court system turned to Wovenware to reimagine a case management solution that would help it operate more efficiently and help judges and others more effectively resolve cases and bring justice swiftly to order. To do this, it needed a system that would provide a holistic view of all of the information for each case across criminal, appellate and supreme courts.

Setting a goal for success

State court systems across the nation have been working tirelessly to digitize and modernize the management of the many cases it handles, as well as courtroom schedules in order to boost efficiency and reduce mistakes caused by manual data entry. With recent Federal grants provided to help state court systems modernize their operations, a state court system came to us to help them leverage these funds to help it digitize operations and replace a manual process, which included physical files, printed forms and warehouses filled with boxes.

Our challenges and learnings

  • All current and necessary information must be accessible and available when someone needs it.
  • The future system must be user-friendly and intuitive and minimize the learning curve for new judicial department users.
  • It must allow users to focus on what matters by reducing and even removing repetitive tasks and processes. It can’t depend on employees with decades of institutional knowledge.
  • The system should not be restrictive, it should be able to serve everyone and allow users to leverage it within the scope of the legal process, allowing for different working styles especially between judges and clerks.
  • The court administration office should be able to stay abreast of all stages and decisions of a case to be able to react on time and ensure cases move through the system without delays.

The Wovenware Approach

We knew that simply defining a general case management system would miss the opportunity to understand the complexities of use by a myriad of stakeholders and that inherently many unknown needs or challenges would never surface in traditional requirements gathering. Nor would it allow us or our client to take a fresh look at the challenges and needs in order to create a future-proof system with a clear roadmap for continuous improvement. The goal was to create a system focused on real-world human needs, workflows and objectives.

Wovenware’s Design and Innovation practice created a 10-week immersive and accelerated Human-Centric Discovery process to understand the needs and context of use of key stakeholders within criminal, appellate and supreme court processes, with a sharp focus on what it takes to manage cases.

We started with compressed workshops to get a process overview of what takes place from the initiation of a court case, through the various steps that could ultimately escalate to the supreme court, as prescribed by law and court practice. This included reviewing current process documents and interviewing key internal process experts including multiple sessions throughout the process with a former appellate court judge. In parallel we did desk research to learn what other jurisdictions were doing with their modernization efforts.