CaseLink: Legal Case Doc Management Software

The customer is a USA-based product company with a focus on serving government sectors, specifically in the fields of public services, law and justice.

Challenge:

The client is a USA-based product company with various software offerings across government sectors. The client needs to develop document management system software that caters to the Police Department within the USA. The Software will help Police officers/ Super Cops/ Law enforcement agencies, and Justice officials review multiple cases in one place efficiently.

Some of the Key challenges of the project were:

• Working with multiple File Types, i.e. [.Mp4, .MOV, .3GP, .Wav, .MP3, Jpg, .JPEG, .PNG, .PPT, .PDF, .XLSX,] Most of the files supported by one browser-based web application for playing and converting the files in the suitable file type in the background using AWS services.
• Cropping and storing large files in small chunks; some were 1 GB and more than 1 GB, while the entire case files go up to 500GB - 1TB memory.
• Security is the major part of this doc management software application as this will consist of Confidential data; we have used multilevel securities like 2-factor authentication, including data encryption, every payload, and response encryption.
• The Video file conversion happens in the background. Also, the browser supports the MP4 video version. Users can crop videos, generate automated transcripts, edit the transcripts, and download videos with subtitles. Also, users can easily download and store subtitles for each case and story.

Solutions:

We reviewed the project requirements and recommended developing a legal case management software that allows jury, police officers, and other departments to create cases, stories within cases, add case timelines and case information, media files, and much more.

1. Multi-Tenant System

• The document management software for legal cases has multiple roles and rights, with every bit of the smallest module developed for this application
  • Department Jury  (view-only access)
  • Department User (custom access based on what organization needs)
  • Department Admin (full access)
  • Super Admin (full access)
• The system allows the admin to assign suitable roles and rights to users and can modify the rights.
• In the system, the Super admin can manage all departments. Once all the departments are created, the admin can access all of the required crime cases and supportive files in no time with ease.
• Every Department user is in discussion with the Jury and will bifurcate the details of each case by discussing the incidents that happened in a CaseLink manner where inputs from the Jury, like evidence and supportive files for a case, can be managed easily.
• The jury can log in/ review and showcase the crime incident in front of a judge, impacting how the 21st-generation software for data analytics should work.

2. Story/ Case Creation:

• The Department Head will add the required staff for an investigation of every case received in hard copy; the staff will enter the number and details of the case in the system and create the case story.
• The case story consists of evidence received by the police officer by visiting the crime/ incident scene. The police officer will provide all the media files in any format, which the user will incorporate in the case as a timeline by selecting the crime, incident date/time, and location.

3. Statistics & Reports:

• Number of media files added in each case by timeline.
• Number of Locations in location history added during each incident/ crime at the crime scene.
• Many devices like cell phones, cars, trucks, and any tracking device and their related data will be added manually by the officer to a particular time and date.
• PDF Document Export- This will contain the entire timeline of the incident/ case, which includes file names and transcripts. if the video is available between the start and end date, the PDF will automatically contain the video transcription.
• From the start to the end of the point where all the documents, folder structure, bookmarks, transcripts, and PDFs are given –export functionality is provided in the settings

4. Media Platform:

• A powerful and robust system allowing multiple file formats.
• The system is capable of managing 1Tb files per case/ story.
• Users can crop the files within the system using start and end times.
• The user is capable enough to visualize multiple videos on one screen at a time; currently, the user can play back 20 Videos at a time, for which an especially new streaming module has been developed.
• Users can generate Watermark Video/ Audio Transcripts with a single button click and edit the generated transcript/ video captions. Users can add keyword phrases highlighting the words in added videos.

5. Files Management:

• Enhanced folder structure, which securely stores encrypted files for each case folder.
• Each file can be accessed by the users who have required permission.
• Specifically, video files will be stored using a new module implementation that uses streaming APIs that store the large files in small chunks, increasing video playback and quality efficiency.

Results:

The Case Link Project Transformed Incident/ Crime Case Management drastically. The new web application delivers and reduces the dependencies on the hard drive/pen drive devices that are used to represent the data without any reliability on the event’s time and date. It also elevates the new process where users can add all the data related to crime cases in one place, and it helps the jury to represent the data at the time of hearing in a detailed manner which eliminates data loss, theft, and data tempering for the classified files and makes the system more secure.

Technologies and Tools

• Platform: Windows, AWS Cloud Services, Fargate, Transcription, SNS (Simple Notification Service), SQS (Simple Queue Service), DynamoDB, CloudWatch, Pinpoint, S3 Bucket, Amazon Textract, SES (Simple Email Service)
• Language: C#, .NET Framework 4.6.2, .NET 6.0
• Backend: .NET 6.0 API
• Frontend: Angular
• Tools: Visual Studio, MySQL Workbench, phpMyAdmin, DBeaver, Sequelize (Node.js), Docker CLI, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Angular CLI, RxJS, NgRx, TypeScript Compiler, .NET CLI, FFmpeg CLI, AWS CLI, ECode Signer from SSL.com
• Database: MySQL Server
• Container Services: Docker, AWS ECR
• Video Processing: ffmpeg.exe, fprobe.exe