Client Background
The Legal Aid Department is a Government Department that provides legal representation to eligible applicants by a solicitor and, if necessary, a barrister in civil or criminal proceedings.
Legal aid is available, inter alia, to cases in the District Court, the Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeal and the Court of Final Appeal. It is also available for committal proceedings in the Magistrates' Courts. Any person, whether or not resident in Hong Kong, who is involved in the above court proceedings may apply for legal aid. Legal aid will be granted if the applicant is able to satisfy the statutory criteria as to the financial eligibility and the merits for taking or defending the legal proceedings.
The Legal Aid Department is a Government Department that provides legal representation to eligible applicants by a solicitor and, if necessary, a barrister in civil or criminal proceedings.
Legal aid is available, inter alia, to cases in the District Court, the Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeal and the Court of Final Appeal. It is also available for committal proceedings in the Magistrates' Courts. Any person, whether or not resident in Hong Kong, who is involved in the above court proceedings may apply for legal aid. Legal aid will be granted if the applicant is able to satisfy the statutory criteria as to the financial eligibility and the merits for taking or defending the legal proceedings.
Business Challenge
The Legal Aid Department handles hundreds of legal cases of various type, like criminal, family, injure, civil, ...etc each year. Every case will go though a process of application and assessment of the eligibility of the applicant for legal aid, then the case will be assigned either to the LAD in-house legal consult or outside to the private practice lawyers that work on behalf of LAD. Next, the case will go to court and the hearing and court procedures may last from months to years. During the course of the whole process, thousands of related documents many be generated by both sides of the parties and need to be managed and filed in good order for easy reference. Finally, a financial account need to be prepared in related to the settlement of the case, if external lawyers are employed, further legal fees also need to be monitored and paid in accordance.
The client had an initiative to automate the whole process of the daily operation of case management process with a central repository for all the data and documents. There are huge amount of data in related especially the no. of document files. The system also needs to be very reliable as it will operate to support the daily work of every staffs in the department.
The Legal Aid Department handles hundreds of legal cases of various type, like criminal, family, injure, civil, ...etc each year. Every case will go though a process of application and assessment of the eligibility of the applicant for legal aid, then the case will be assigned either to the LAD in-house legal consult or outside to the private practice lawyers that work on behalf of LAD. Next, the case will go to court and the hearing and court procedures may last from months to years. During the course of the whole process, thousands of related documents many be generated by both sides of the parties and need to be managed and filed in good order for easy reference. Finally, a financial account need to be prepared in related to the settlement of the case, if external lawyers are employed, further legal fees also need to be monitored and paid in accordance.
The client had an initiative to automate the whole process of the daily operation of case management process with a central repository for all the data and documents. There are huge amount of data in related especially the no. of document files. The system also needs to be very reliable as it will operate to support the daily work of every staffs in the department.
Solutions
This development contract was the largest in Future Solutions history, it involved about 300 man-months efforts. The system was built on a farm of high availability servers, powered by Oracle database and programmed by Visual Basic. The complicated workflow not involved only rule based routing, but also ad-hoc re-directed flow path according to the case situation. In order to cope with this requirement, we have employed a workflow engine and a specially developed task modeler which capable for real time task assigning and routing of the whole case file. User can override the defined workflow by changing the rules or by direct assigning the task priority.
For handling document generation, there are more than 1700 word document templates developed which will automatically merged from the data sources as required. Moreover, hundreds of management reports are prepared by using Crystal Report Server in order fulfill various levels of users.
The system was deployed to 3 divisional offices of the department, yet with centralize databases, and over 700 no. of concurrent online users. The system was later enhanced to support both the Official Solicitor Office and Solicitor Compliant Management.
This development contract was the largest in Future Solutions history, it involved about 300 man-months efforts. The system was built on a farm of high availability servers, powered by Oracle database and programmed by Visual Basic. The complicated workflow not involved only rule based routing, but also ad-hoc re-directed flow path according to the case situation. In order to cope with this requirement, we have employed a workflow engine and a specially developed task modeler which capable for real time task assigning and routing of the whole case file. User can override the defined workflow by changing the rules or by direct assigning the task priority.
For handling document generation, there are more than 1700 word document templates developed which will automatically merged from the data sources as required. Moreover, hundreds of management reports are prepared by using Crystal Report Server in order fulfill various levels of users.
The system was deployed to 3 divisional offices of the department, yet with centralize databases, and over 700 no. of concurrent online users. The system was later enhanced to support both the Official Solicitor Office and Solicitor Compliant Management.
Benefits
- Automate workflow process of the whole case lifecycle
- Highly increase the efficiency of the operation
- Cost saving
- Human error in document handling is avoided
- Timely delivery of documents to other parties are possible
- Bring up scheduler remind appointments
- Auto data exchange with external system, e.g. treasury system
Solutions