(9) Trial Session Management

As a Judge, so that I can appropriately manage cases within a trial session, I need the ability to view all cases for a trial session, create notes and indicate their status as it pertains to the trial session.

As a Judge for the Tax Court, I often travel to trial locations throughout the United States to officiate cases that have been scheduled to a trial session. When I travel, it can be very cumbersome for my trial clerk and I to transport paper case documents. Communications and organization can also be a challenge for me while I'm traveling due to a lack access to court systems and sometimes the Internet.

Before I leave DC to travel to a trial session, I may hold conference calls with the parties or have other notes that I want to make related to a specific case. I need these notes to be viewable to me and to whomever else I give permission to. As I'm in transit to my trial location, I may want to be able to view and take notes on the cases scheduled for trial, as well as view specific documents filed in a case. Because I may have limited access to the Internet as I travel, I batch download the documents for all cases on to my laptop. They are saved/grouped by case and display in the order they are listed in system (docket record). This allows me to review the cases while in flight or in an area of the airport where I do not get cellular coverage.

When I arrive on site for a trial session, one of the first things I do is to have a "Calendar Call." During a calendar call, the parties for each case that is scheduled for the trial session is present in the court room. To perform the calendar call, my trial clerk calls before the Court every case that scheduled for the session. As each case is called, the parties tell me the trial status (not to be confused with the case status) of the case and whether a trial is necessary. As each case is called, I make notes about the current case status, their availability to attend the trial session and their preferred day and time. I use this information to organize the trials for the week. As I'm getting trial status updates for each case, I determine which cases will not need a trial that week. Because there initially are so many cases scheduled for a trial session, I don't like to concern myself with any that won't be scheduled for trial and like to whittle down my list to only those for which an actual trial will take place.

Roles:

Judge
Trial Clerk

Pre-Conditions

Trial session has been created

Acceptance Criteria

Judge can:

See in a quick glance all the cases scheduled for the trial session they will attend
Take notes on the list of cases before trial session and during calendar call.
- The judge or trial clerk should not have to open the case to see the notes.
- Notes should only be viewable to Judge and any other Court user the Judge grants access to
Batch download all at once documents for one or more of the cases scheduled for a trial session.
- Batch download should create one ZIP file for each case; documents within each ZIP file should display in the same order they are on the docket record
Give the case a "trial status" for each case that's ready for trial; statuses will be pre-populated
Narrow the list of cases by one or more "trial statuses" so they can easily see a grouping of trials in that status
Sort the list of cases by "trial status"
Easily access the case details from the list of cases
Take case-related notes within the case; these notes should also only be viewable to the Judge and any other court user the Judge grants access to.
Take session-related notes; these notes should also only be viewable to the Judge and any other court user the Judge grants access to.

What's Missing from this Epic?

Notes

How do users know if cases will not be scheduled? What info determines this and can we provide easy access to it? Currently, if a motion has been filed in a case, and is still pending, that can is not considered eligible to be calendared for trial. This seems silly and we are considering what instances a case doesn't/shouldn't be scheduled for trial. For MVP, we may decide that all cases should show up on report as eligible for trial
Are we keeping track of the actual trial date and time in the system or only "trial session" ? Date and city of trial session

Tasks

[ ] Discuss what is missing from the epic. Esp. in light of only looking at happy path.
[ ] Answer and document all open questions
[ ] Plan user research needed to complete the epic
[ ] Conduct any additional user research needed to complete the epic
[ ] Create or update system and UX flows and diagrams (USTC e-file process, domain model, etc)
[ ] Determine approach for form error handling
[ ] Plan and conduct usability testing

Test Scenarios

Definition of Done

[ ] Add UX flow docs to code repository
[ ] Ensure Figma is archived as pages for each sprint; if we move away from sprints, maybe at the end of each epic?

flexion / ef-cms