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Case Tracking for the Department of Labor Adjudication

The Department of Labor Office of Administrative Law Judges selected NetBase to define and implement a new Case Management System (CMS) to replace three separate mainframe applications and provide efficient, secure, unified access to past and present cases. The new CMS operates over the client's national wide-area network using a centralized Microsoft SQL Server database into which NetBase migrated and integrated the existing data from the main frames. The CMS tracks more than 600,000 active cases and more than 7 million total events, and is much more powerful, faster, and more functional than the three legacy mainframe applications it replaced. The web-based system allows online access, real-time tracking, and dynamic querying and reporting of extensive judicial case status and data. The CMS tracks a case through the entire life cycle of the judicial process (currently 28 types of events), including case assignment, records and evidence, hearings, decisions, petitions, motions, briefs, attorney fees, appeals, and re-considerations. The CMS provides real-time case status of active and historical cases with pro-active notification and reminders of scheduled events.

A major component of the CMS is the Document Issuance automation module. Issuing documents to litigants and other courts is a significant cost factor for an adjudicatory organization. The costs for producing paper document copies and the cost for transporting them to the required recipients continues to increase. Postal rates for Government Agencies have doubled in recent years. The CMS Document Management System (DMS) is used to prepare, issue, and electronically deliver over 25,000 case related documents per year. Of these 25,000 documents issued, there are an average of 10 recipients resulting in over 250,000 documents being mailed or express delivered per year. The DMS module currently provides electronic delivery targeting 80% of OALJ's document recipients. The CMS approach to electronic delivery of issued documents includes features automating the creating of document Service Sheets, storage of the issued document and service sheet as part of the CMS event record, for ensuring fairness between hard copy and electronic document recipients, and for recording the actual time stamp that an individual retrieved their electronic copy of the issued document.