Criminal Charges - With a Twist

Our client was the Nassau District Attorney's Office. For those of you who haven't seen Law & Order on TV, the DA's office is the government body that prosecutes pursuant to their criminal justice system. Take the video tour.  For many years, the DA's office had produced their documents using an IBM Mainframe solution which was unwieldy, expensive and worst of all: very difficult to maintain. The scope of the project was to allow new statutes, attorneys and staff members to be added quickly and easily while providing finalized documents without post-assembly editing.

The video displays some of the features of HotDocs 6.x and 2005 - the ability to run as many simultaneous repeats as you wish, and use this to dynamically create and populate data. In particular, the system asks the user to enter a list of defendants in a matter. It then asks the user to enter all the charges in the matter, and assign the relevant defendant(s) to each charge. The system then references the charges against the defendants (and vice versa) to simulate a relational database, ensuring that data is only ever entered once.

Also featured in the video is actual process of creating charges. The charges are statutes under the New York Penal Law and Vehicle Law codes. All statutes, reference numbers, charge titles and the like are stored in an MS Access database. The system will reference the statute number entered by the user, retrieve the relevant statute from the database, and then populate the current answer file's data into the text of the charge. This system was in excess of USD20,000.00 however, it drafts all grand jury charge documents in minutes, instead of hours...literally. For an office that does nothing but charge offenders, the system is a good investment.

PS: None of the lookup lists are actually coded in HotDocs - they are all created on the fly, based upon the most recent data in the database that sits behind this system. Not only is the data handled automatically, but also the lists that hook into that data!