Legal Services │ Service Design
Wovenware delivers a better case management system to better document and manage court system workloads.
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 Further, outdated processes and systems increased the problem and added greater complexity and frustrations.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.
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.
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.
Building
it Right
We held a session with our client in order to get feedback and identify priorities to be addressed.
Wovenware was able to successfully reimagine the management of cases and, by doing so, update processes and systems to improve the experience of the court system. This allowed judges, lawyers and legal clerks to focus on what really matters. We helped our client better understand how other state court systems were leveraging emerging technology to address long-standing challenges. But our insights and solutions were not limited to technology.
In fact, one of the most interesting findings was the emergence of more and more people representing themselves before the court – from inmates looking for reassessment of their cases, to citizens advocating for themselves in the upper courts. This led us to present ideas that would improve access to justice for everyone, by simplifying the process and creating support systems to track these cases as well. We also uncovered needs unique to the workflow between appellate court judges and their clerks that could be improved with better technology, as well as processes.
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Cases