
Apply HN: Casepad – Better Databases for Public Defenders and Others - jedgardyson
Potemkin Demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.casepad.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.casepad.io</a><p>Problem: lawyers, judges, and clerks who work in high volume case environments (public defense, small claims, family, housing, prosecution) at the state and local level need databases to: 
(1) Get access to basic information about their cases 
(2) Fulfill their sometimes onerous compliance requirements 
(3) Run basic analytics on their caseloads 
(4) Schedule their work around court appearances, client availability, etc.<p>Existing tools don&#x27;t deliver on these four points because: no mobile or web access, onerous amounts of time to generate simple compliance reports, a lack any sort of extensibility, no integration with basic office productivity tools, bad search&#x2F;indexing, and no automation of the onerous data intake process.<p>Casepad: is an attempt to solve these issues. We have partnered with one of NYC&#x27;s institutional defense providers to build a modern database service geared towards these needs. They&#x27;ve provided us with full access to their staff, introductions to other professionals, and some &quot;seed&quot; money to build an mvp.<p>About us: we&#x27;re brothers. I&#x27;m a &#x27;14 college graduate who worked in NYC as a data analyst. My brother is studying CS in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where we both grew up.<p>Why We&#x27;re Applying: two main reasons. First, we could use the money. It would be great if my brother could afford to move to NY with me and we could both tackle this full time. Second, I think we would benefit from the mentorship that YC and its network have to provide. It would be great to learn more from folks who have built great tech businesses.<p>Prior Work: we&#x27;ve been writing code and interviewing users for Casepad for about 3mo now. Over 60 attorneys, judges, and clerks were interviewed while we validated some of our assumptions about the broader legal market.<p>If you have any questions, comments, feedback, or interest in the project reach out. We&#x27;d love to hear from you!
======
oliyoung
I've spent a couple of years in the legal tech industry and this looks like a
cool solution, in a lucrative market that are willing to spend A LOT of money
on IT solutions but I'd keep in mind

\- Your customers will be running a centralised practice management platform
(basically a specialised CRM), you'll need to integrate with it; this isn't
easy. In fact it's really hard.

\- Most of the time, the fee-earner/practitioner won't do any of their own
data input, they'll have their PA do it for them, consider this when you're
building a backend.

\- They live and die by their Outlook calendars and contacts. You'll need to
integrate with that; this is easier.

\- You'll have questions about how you're storing and transmitting data and
what jurisdiction its being hosted in. Some of these questions will seem naive
and obvious, but legal tech is a _paranoid_ market.

\- This is also a CONSERVATIVE market, they fear change, they don't like
change. This is a constant uphill battle.

\- The flip side is that 90% of the software in this market is 5-10 years old
and "cloud" solutions are novel and strange to them (cf fear about data
storage)

\- Focus on mobile. Ignore desktop. Seriously.

\- Don't discount this only being applicable for lawyers, any professional
service industry (financial planners etc) will benefit from this.

\- You're right compliance, audit trails, history is EVERYTHING. Pitch it as a
record keeping solution for the firm, not a productivity tool for the
practitioner.

\- Bake in export. Make the data as easy to get out and easy to get in.

~~~
jedgardyson
First off, thank you very very much for your comments and feedback. This post
is amazingly on point based on everything we have seen so far. A few points to
elaborate:

-They are. The folks we are developing with use one of these. We are still trying to figure out how to pull the data out of it into a portable format of some sorts, but we haven't had the time to crack the nut yet. Thankfully, our current client has expressed a willingness to run their CRM system side-by-side with our product as we launch and develop. As it currently stands the value of their data falls dramatically over time because its just not easy to get to.

-We've identified a number of constituencies within law firms (clerks, attorneys, managers as broad classes) they all have different use cases and we are doing our best to consider each of them as we progress.

-Yes.

-We think a bit more paranoia about data storage is not necessarily a bad thing. I personally enjoy explaining how this stuff works to people (its not just lawyers, most people don't have a good understanding about how and where their data is stored online).

-Yes, this was one of our biggest struggles starting out. I've been doing the research for a lot longer than we have been coding and trust building has actually been the hardest thing we've had to do.

-Yup!

-We will keep this in mind. We are currently developing it as a responsive web app (so functional on both) but we will definitely keep our eyes open for ways to enrich the mobile experience.

-This is a fascinating and ambitious thought that I will save for later.

-Again, 100% spot on. The managers are the decision makers and what they care about is record keeping and compliance.

-Will do more of this as we continue development. We have it set up for the backend currently, but I can definitely see the value for end users of being able to export bits and pieces of the data as needed.

Thanks again

~~~
oliyoung
Pleasure :)

This "our current client has expressed a willingness to run their CRM system
side-by-side with our product as we launch and develop. " is really important,
partner with a guinea pig firm so you can learn on the ground

------
dbot
I've thought about this problem pretty extensively (as a lawyer and software
developer).

My question is who are you selling this to? If it's just attorneys, that's
fine. But if you want courts to adopt it, you will be competing thru a
procurement process. This can be death for a startup - long timelines,
complicated bidding procedures, and endless requests for customizations.
There's huge amounts of money to be made, but by established players who are
familiar with the process, built a basic CMS, and can spend thousands of hours
of dev time customizing and installing it. Often for just one jurisdiction.
Rinse and repeat for the rest of the country...

What I've proposed in the past is a "Wordpress for courts" \- a free, open
source case management system. It will be more quickly adopted by smaller
courts with limited budgets. As larger court systems take notice, they will be
attracted not just to the cost and better UX, but the extensibility. The
country will benefit by having better, faster access to court records, case
law, etc.

I've considered submitting it as a non-profit to HN. And you could easily
create a for-profit based on implementation and customization services.

~~~
nkw
> (as a lawyer and software developer)

Me too.

>What I've proposed in the past is a "Wordpress for courts" \- a free, open
source case management system. It will be more quickly adopted by smaller
courts with limited budgets. As larger court systems take notice, they will be
attracted not just to the cost and better UX, but the extensibility. The
country will benefit by having better, faster access to court records, case
law, etc.

This. So much this. Courts are either buying commercial systems which are
incredibly expensive and suck, or building their own which turns into a huge
political football and results in a product that is ... what you expect.
Someone (perhaps a 501c3 or something similar) needs to build a best in class
open source court/case management system. Similar to what the 18F people are
doing at the federal executive branch. There is still plenty of money for
contractors/companies to make implementing and maintaining the solution for
the individual courts, but every court in the country from the U.S. Court of
Appeals to Mayberry Municipal Court running (or developing!) a different
management system is insane.

Imagine if all the Courts had a common API to accept your filings or notify
you of case activities?

~~~
jedgardyson
Thank you for your comment. It is spot on.

Like I alluded to in the comment above, this was the problem that originally
captivated me about the space.

I was retrieving some documents from court and had to go there in person once,
and then 3mo later, to get the job done. Started reading about standards,
court data practices in all 50 states and was appaled by the absence of good
tools and open standards to solve exactly the problem you mentioned.

I've wanted to be a public interest lawyer my whole life, but when I saw how
terrible the tooling/public data infrastructure for it was I thought that if I
could take a crack at solving this problem it would, for me, be a more
meaningful contribution towards helping to improve the lives of the people
those attorneys serve.

------
nkw
> If you have any questions, comments, feedback, or interest in the project
> reach out. We'd love to hear from you!

Nice project. One comment (as a lawyer) - Have an API. So much legal software
out there is a closed island. Maybe the developers think they can lock
everyone into using their software for everything (calendar, document
management, billing) by not providing an API, but it is infuriating. Chances
are we might really like one part of your app (not you specifically, but legal
software vendors), but other parts of it are mediocre at best and we don't
want to use it. E.g. - all the case management software that also wants to be
the datastore for our documents. Really? We already have dropbox, I seriously
doubt you are better than them at storing documents in the cloud and syncing
to local machines.

I've starting rejecting software at our firm if it 1) doesn't have an easy way
to get all of our data out in a reasonable format and 2) doesn't have an API
that plays nice with the other software we use.

~~~
jmnicolas
As a lawyer you're storing legal documents on Dropbox ?

~~~
nkw
Yep. Dropbox for Business, but it is pretty much normal dropbox with some
auditing and management features.

~~~
anonymousDan
Forgive my ignorance, but does Dropbox for Business support client side
encryption? Is this something you even care about, or are there some usability
barriers that make it not worth your while?

~~~
nkw
It does not. At least not any more than any other filesystem in a cloud type
service. For items which we deem especially sensitive we will place them in an
encrypted disk image which is then stored as a file in dropbox, however it is
a very very rare occurrence we deem it necessary to do this. While a
compromise at dropbox is certainly a risk, it is reasonably far down on the
list of likely events compared to other risks.

We utilize full disk encryption on all of our machines and MDM type services
which allow us to brick/erase a device remotely (now dropbox for business has
a similar feature which will wipe a remote device if it connects to the server
after such a request). We also force on dropbox's 2FA for all users and every
access to a file by a user is logged.

Dropbox also gives us the ability to revert to any version of a file in the
event a user makes an unwanted modification (a whoops or something like
crypto-ransomware malware).

Obviously there are still risks in this type of setup, but most law firms I
have seen have far far riskier setups that have far easier vulnerabilities to
exploit if they were a target than Dropbox being compromised. (At least in my
opinion).

EDIT: Also, I want to amplify that the information security skills and
experience present at any major cloud provider (google, aws, dropbox, box,
etc.) is in a totally different league than anything I have seen at even the
huge MegaBigLawFirms. There are very few firms that take information security
as seriously as they should and even those do not have the resources of the
aforementioned companies. Essentially I trust google/dropbox to keep their
digital stuff secure more than I would trust any law firm on the planet.

There is one exception to this -- which is some sort of sealed search warrant
or national security type letter from a government agency. If there is
information you are seeking to protect from an exploit in that realm, then
they are certainly vulnerable in that area and you (the law firm) need to
implement other precautions to address that vulnerability.

~~~
anonymousDan
Hey, thanks for your detailed response. I definitely wasn't implying that not
using client-side encryption is obviously a bad decision on your part. I
totally buy that the security expertise of Dropbox et al is in a different
league to that of most law firms. I'm a security researcher currently working
on secure cloud storage and it's very interesting to hear about requirements
of real users, especially for an industry as security sensitive as the legal
industry.

Regarding the exception you mention, what granularity would you make this
distinction at? For example, would you typically just say that all files
related to a particular case must be protected from a government agency, or
would you divide up the storage of files for particular cases at a finer
granularity (e.g. some files for this case can be stored on Dropbox).

If Dropbox offered a solution with client-side encryption, how much do you
think you would be willing to pay for it in terms of cost or performance?

------
jakobegger
I'm impressed by your application; it's good that you are doing so much
interviewing. Probably the killer feature is automatic compliance reporting; I
could imagine that this will sell the software.

But to me this sounds more like bespoke software for a single client rather
than a startup.

If you want to apply with this idea, you need to make sure there actually is a
market for your software.

I've seen many people attempt a "startup" by writing software for free for one
client, hoping to sell it to other clients with similar needs. These other
clients then never materialised, since the software usually ended up too
specific and was only useful for their original client, who got to use it for
free (or very cheap).

~~~
jedgardyson
This is definitely a valid concern to have.

Based on our research we think the guts and functionality of the product are
portable to other use cases in the legal system. We might have to tweak the
data model a bit, but the guts of the application should stay the same.

Also, although the market for PDs is "small" in the grand scheme of startups
we think there is still plenty of money in it to at least generate enough cash
flow to start a company that builds this class of solutions for high volume
legal practitioners.

------
nlh
Just want to say, basically as an aside, that I find the structure and content
of both the original post and the comments here EXCELLENT. Civil, intelligent,
thoughtful. Well done OP, and well done HN.

------
rayiner
If you haven't considered it, I'd strongly encourage you to look into client-
side encryption. Lawyers have various opinions on it, but with what various
governments are doing these days, storing data in a way where the service
provider can't read it would be a big selling point for an industry that deals
in confidential information.

~~~
jedgardyson
Will definitely look more into this. We had looked into some encryption
options based on our current database solution but will dig more into it re
figuring out how to hide the users' data from us.

------
vykster
Start with data standards, and build them transparently. Many state and
federal agencies are making calls for adoption of standards in data
publication, to save time designing and implementing interoperability, or
simply compiling data from different jurisdictions for federal reporting.

See the recent call by the US DOT for agencies to adopt and publish transit
data using the GTFS data standards (originally developed by Google for
streamlining consumption of transit data )from different agencies.
[http://gis.rita.dot.gov/Transit/downloads/DearColleague.pdf](http://gis.rita.dot.gov/Transit/downloads/DearColleague.pdf)

BLDS Specification originally developed by Accela for building permits. Now
many competitors are signing on and adopting the standard.
[http://permitdata.org/](http://permitdata.org/)

~~~
jedgardyson
Thanks for the comment and the links.

Your point is well taken. We are committed to building transparently and with
good standards.

We have looked at some existing legal documentation standards such as
LegalXML[0] and are still in the process of evaluating whether or not we
should implement them in our work. We are also open to developing additional
standards as needed, but need to do a lot more research before we feel
comfortable claiming the world needs yet another specification[1]. :)

[0] [http://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-
courtfiling/specs/ecf/v4...](http://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-
courtfiling/specs/ecf/v4.01/ecf-v4.01-spec/errata01/os/ecf-v4.01-spec-
errata01-os-complete.html#_Toc343512727)

[1] [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

------
ryporter
How will you make money? You made no mention of it in the post, and it would
really surprise me if there's enough money in this market for you to be able
to deliver the sort of return VCs are looking for. This may be a better
candidate for YC's nonprofit track.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
There is lots of money in providing services for attorneys/the legal system,
so I wouldn't discount it out of hand.

~~~
ryporter
Right, but their tagline suggests that their primary customers will be public
defenders. I don't know much about that market, but I doubt that they have
much of a budget for tools like this.

~~~
koolba
There's a _lot_ of cases available for public defender and the standard bill
rate ranges from $50-$100/hour. That easily covers a $10/case fee[1]. Assuming
this will save the attorney 6-12 minutes of total time (over the life of the
case) it's a net win for them.

[1]: I'm making up the $10 number. No clue what pricing they'll be doing.

~~~
jedgardyson
Yup! This is the answer that we came to from our research. If we could save
the defenders (or courts or prosecutors) even a small amount of time per case
then we can generate enough value to charge them a $/per case fee. We're still
honing in on what the exact sweetspot for the case fee is, but based on what
other folks in the market are doing it seems to be somewhere between $2-10
depending on who and where the client is.

------
kaishiro
Having spent a fair part of my life working in the criminal justice research
field, the biggest blocker I see to something like this is political.

I can only speak to Massachusetts, and I can only speak to the time ~ mid
2000s when Rhode Island and Massachusetts were dealing with claims of racial
profiling - specifically driving while black - but there was a great deal of
friction with having a central store of _any_ aggregate data on specific
judges.

The idea that you could easily run an analysis of a judge's decisions cross
referenced by, say, race, was such a complete non-starter in most professional
judicial working groups where you'd be looking for buy-in on something like
this. Having a good deal of these records available in disparate systems, or
even better, only in paper form, was actually a concerted decision at that
point in time.

I'm really interested to see what kind of traction you see (and where it comes
from). Good luck!

~~~
jedgardyson
This is 100% correct and something that we have considered. If you go and talk
to IT managers, chief clerks, and chief judges it quickly becomes clear that
the politics of these sales to court clients are tremendous obstacles to
overcome. This is the main reason why we decided not to sell to courts first.
Once we have a great product and happy user base then we'll take a crack at
them.

Thanks for the comment!

------
kmfrk
I'm just thinking out loud, but this sounds like one of those services that
needs 24/7 customer support. I remember being close to infuriated to have to
wait days for a response for my registrar, and I can only imagine the tension
involved the day something goes haywire, regardless of whose fault, if any, it
is.

Maybe setting up some sort of volunteer customer support in, say, Slack could
be the way forward? You could also implement a livechat integration that feeds
into your public Slack team.

~~~
jedgardyson
Thanks for the comment.

This is an interesting idea and something my brother (who has done more IT
support than me in the past) has been badgering me about for quite some time.
Most likely we will end up hiring someone to help handle this full time once
we have more than one client, but for the first go around I just plan to do it
myself. (Do things that don't scale says the church of PG)

------
OliverJones
A suggestion. Try to take an iPad or other tablet into a courthouse. Those
devices are forbidden in the courthouse in my neighborhood, as are mobile
phones.

You probably need strong use-cases that DON'T involve in-the-courthouse
access. Or you need an influential chief judge or court-clerk department
executive in some visible jurisdiction on your board of advisers.

~~~
nkw
> A suggestion. Try to take an iPad or other tablet into a courthouse. Those
> devices are forbidden in the courthouse in my neighborhood, as are mobile
> phones.

As a counterpoint, all the courts and jurisdictions I practice in permit
attorneys to bring an electronic device into court. (Although may god have
mercy on your soul if it should make a noise in court). Several have
implemented e-filing and provide wifi in the courtroom for attorneys. One has
laptops provided by the court on counsel tables to access the court's filing
system and in another the prosecutors have computers in the courtrooms which
are on their office's network. Come to think of it I can't think of ANY court
I've been in the last 5 years which doesn't permit attorneys to bring in
electronic devices. Non-attorneys -- yes, they are not allowed to bring in
electronic devices.

------
SherlockeHolmes
The social benefit out of this is irrefutable. Our criminal justice system can
use all the help it can get. Two comments: i) it would be good to include some
database support with smart query to allow public defenders across locations
to work seamlessly with each other if needed, ii) create a repository for
evidences and relevant information for each case.

~~~
jedgardyson
Thanks for the comment.

i) Data portability is a key feature for us. As the excellent comment above
noted users have been burned by fairly complex and locked-down in house CRM
systems so we are doing our absolute best to make sure that the data can be
accessed and ported in an easy way. ii) This is an interesting idea,
especially with regards to evidence, care to elaborate a bit more? Do you
think there is room for something beyond the regular database to track these
case features?

~~~
SherlockeHolmes
I just noticed the "documents" feature in the demo. It allows the user to
upload relevant documents for each case to the system, which is basically what
I was going for here.

------
sandGorgon
I'm unclear on what this is - is this something like
[https://github.com/ChrisZieba/LogicPull](https://github.com/ChrisZieba/LogicPull)
(that someone opensourced on HN incidentally) .

Or are you building indexing + collaboration on existing databases ? Kind of a
collaborative LexisNexis ?

~~~
donovanbiela
LogicPull appears to be (and correct me if I'm wrong) and advanced intake
system. Never used it before, but it looks like an amazing solution to collect
form data and create documents, even allowing JS in the editor to control flow
of the questions. The repo looks pretty active as well.

------
Gratsby
This is a tough market. The money is there, but in my experience Law offices
are like Real Estate offices in that they are willing to spend big money on
one or two solutions, but are skeptical to spend on anything without existing
significant market share.

How are you going to approach sales?

~~~
jedgardyson
Hey, thanks for the question.

I think your intuition here is correct. Like a few other comments mentioned
the buyers are very very conservative.

Our first step to sales will be to deliver on what we've promised to the firm
that has taken a bet on us. The market is very trust driven, since the outcome
of a criminal case can change a persons life, so we need to make sure that we
can deliver on our promises above anything else. That being said, firms really
want a solution to this problem. We have started talking to a few other firms
in NYC who have a use case that is identical to the one we are building for so
once the product is ready we'd hope to follow-up with a few more sales wins.

------
JayNeely
1) What legal risks are you taking on in providing this service, and how will
you offset them? Providing the wrong information (two people with the same
name, user input error you didn't validate, analytics calculation error,
etc.), downtime at a critical moment, client or other confidentiality issues,
etc.

2) Where do you get the data from, and how scalable are those sources (e.g.
does it vary by municipality)?

Just want to echo others saying it's great to hear how many customer
interviews you've done.

~~~
jedgardyson
Thanks for the questions:

1) Not much so far as I can extrapolate (IANAL though). The data is provided
by the attorneys and they will be using this as a service. We will have to
have some sort of uptime guarantees stipulated in our agreement as well as
support, standardized backups and safety policy etc. I'm not going to lie and
say that we have figure this all out already, but we are thinking about it.

2) Starting out it will come from the users themselves (hence the 'New Case'
tab in the demo). Eventually, for municipalities that allow it (NYC criminal
courts are not among them), we'd like to get our hands directly on the case
starting documents (Accusatory instruments, rap sheets, etc) and have them be
piped straight into the system.

------
KerryJones
"Existing tools don't deliver on these four points because..."

What are the existing tools and/or your competitors?

~~~
jedgardyson
Thank you for calling out my straw man!

For the public interest space: LegalServer [0], PDCMS [1] (NY only), Defender
Data [2], Pika Systems [3], CaseBox [4] (notably open source and AGPL), among
others.

[0] [https://www.legalserver.org/](https://www.legalserver.org/) [1]
[http://www.nysda.org/?page=PDCMS](http://www.nysda.org/?page=PDCMS) [2]
[http://www.justiceworks.com/](http://www.justiceworks.com/) [3]
[http://www.pikasoftware.com/](http://www.pikasoftware.com/) [4]
[https://www.casebox.org/](https://www.casebox.org/)

For the down the line court space the companies are much larger: Tyler
Technologies [5], File&Serve Express [6], ImageSoft [7], among others.

[5] [http://www.tylertech.com/solutions-products/courts-
justice-s...](http://www.tylertech.com/solutions-products/courts-justice-
solutions) [6]
[https://secure.fileandservexpress.com](https://secure.fileandservexpress.com)
[7] [http://www.imagesoftinc.com/](http://www.imagesoftinc.com/)

I have a large spreadsheet with what I think is almost every company in the
space, but don't want to post them all here so as to not overwhelm.

I think this is a fair-ish representative cross section of the kind of stuff
that is currently out there though.

------
sushant2mainali
I was wondering how this is different from what Westlaw from thomson reuters
is doing.

[http://thomsonreuters.com/en/products-
services/legal/large-l...](http://thomsonreuters.com/en/products-
services/legal/large-law-firm-practice-and-management/westlaw.html)

May be you could compete on price? Or what is your strategy?

------
chvid
Why do you care about the height and dob of a judge? (As present in the demo)

~~~
jedgardyson
This is more an artifact of how our data is currently organized more than
anything else. It's on the list of things to fix once the guts of the whole
system are set up.

We track height and weight (as well as a few other characteristics of a
persons physical appearance) to give attorneys more data points on how to
distinguish two people who have different names. Who knows, it might also be
relevant to a case someday.

------
grutalampa
This could work in other countries, without the need to change many details of
the program, or is just an USA startup?

~~~
jedgardyson
Hey, thanks for the question!

The short answer is, I am not sure. We haven't really had the time to examine
the demand/need for this type of service outside of the US.

The longer answer is that if we were to expand abroad the data model would
need to be tweaked to adapt to each country/local jurisdictions' particular
needs for compliance and automation. This is something that we will already
have to do across different jurisdictions in the US and are accounting for as
we build the software so, from a purely technical perspective, it should be
feasible.

