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Apply HN: Casepad – Better Databases for Public Defenders and Others

173 pointsby jedgardysonabout 9 years ago
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!

19 comments

oliyoungabout 9 years ago
I&#x27;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&#x27;d keep in mind<p>- Your customers will be running a centralised practice management platform (basically a specialised CRM), you&#x27;ll need to integrate with it; this isn&#x27;t easy. In fact it&#x27;s really hard.<p>- Most of the time, the fee-earner&#x2F;practitioner won&#x27;t do any of their own data input, they&#x27;ll have their PA do it for them, consider this when you&#x27;re building a backend.<p>- They live and die by their Outlook calendars and contacts. You&#x27;ll need to integrate with that; this is easier.<p>- You&#x27;ll have questions about how you&#x27;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.<p>- This is also a CONSERVATIVE market, they fear change, they don&#x27;t like change. This is a constant uphill battle.<p>- The flip side is that 90% of the software in this market is 5-10 years old and &quot;cloud&quot; solutions are novel and strange to them (cf fear about data storage)<p>- Focus on mobile. Ignore desktop. Seriously.<p>- Don&#x27;t discount this only being applicable for lawyers, any professional service industry (financial planners etc) will benefit from this.<p>- You&#x27;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.<p>- Bake in export. Make the data as easy to get out and easy to get in.
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dbotabout 9 years ago
I&#x27;ve thought about this problem pretty extensively (as a lawyer and software developer).<p>My question is who are you selling this to? If it&#x27;s just attorneys, that&#x27;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&#x27;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...<p>What I&#x27;ve proposed in the past is a &quot;Wordpress for courts&quot; - 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.<p>I&#x27;ve considered submitting it as a non-profit to HN. And you could easily create a for-profit based on implementation and customization services.
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nkwabout 9 years ago
&gt; If you have any questions, comments, feedback, or interest in the project reach out. We&#x27;d love to hear from you!<p>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&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;ve starting rejecting software at our firm if it 1) doesn&#x27;t have an easy way to get all of our data out in a reasonable format and 2) doesn&#x27;t have an API that plays nice with the other software we use.
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jakobeggerabout 9 years ago
I&#x27;m impressed by your application; it&#x27;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.<p>But to me this sounds more like bespoke software for a single client rather than a startup.<p>If you want to apply with this idea, you need to make sure there actually is a market for your software.<p>I&#x27;ve seen many people attempt a &quot;startup&quot; 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).
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nlhabout 9 years ago
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.
rayinerabout 9 years ago
If you haven&#x27;t considered it, I&#x27;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&#x27;t read it would be a big selling point for an industry that deals in confidential information.
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vyksterabout 9 years ago
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.<p>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. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gis.rita.dot.gov&#x2F;Transit&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;DearColleague.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gis.rita.dot.gov&#x2F;Transit&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;DearColleague.pdf</a><p>BLDS Specification originally developed by Accela for building permits. Now many competitors are signing on and adopting the standard. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;permitdata.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;permitdata.org&#x2F;</a>
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ryporterabout 9 years ago
How will you make money? You made no mention of it in the post, and it would really surprise me if there&#x27;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&#x27;s nonprofit track.
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kaishiroabout 9 years ago
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.<p>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 <i>any</i> aggregate data on specific judges.<p>The idea that you could easily run an analysis of a judge&#x27;s decisions cross referenced by, say, race, was such a complete non-starter in most professional judicial working groups where you&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;m really interested to see what kind of traction you see (and where it comes from). Good luck!
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kmfrkabout 9 years ago
I&#x27;m just thinking out loud, but this sounds like one of those services that needs 24&#x2F;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.<p>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.
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OliverJonesabout 9 years ago
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.<p>You probably need strong use-cases that DON&#x27;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.
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SherlockeHolmesabout 9 years ago
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.
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sandGorgonabout 9 years ago
I&#x27;m unclear on what this is - is this something like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ChrisZieba&#x2F;LogicPull" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ChrisZieba&#x2F;LogicPull</a> (that someone opensourced on HN incidentally) .<p>Or are you building indexing + collaboration on existing databases ? Kind of a collaborative LexisNexis ?
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Gratsbyabout 9 years ago
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.<p>How are you going to approach sales?
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JayNeelyabout 9 years ago
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&#x27;t validate, analytics calculation error, etc.), downtime at a critical moment, client or other confidentiality issues, etc.<p>2) Where do you get the data from, and how scalable are those sources (e.g. does it vary by municipality)?<p>Just want to echo others saying it&#x27;s great to hear how many customer interviews you&#x27;ve done.
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KerryJonesabout 9 years ago
&quot;Existing tools don&#x27;t deliver on these four points because...&quot;<p>What are the existing tools and&#x2F;or your competitors?
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sushant2mainaliabout 9 years ago
I was wondering how this is different from what Westlaw from thomson reuters is doing.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thomsonreuters.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products-services&#x2F;legal&#x2F;large-law-firm-practice-and-management&#x2F;westlaw.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thomsonreuters.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products-services&#x2F;legal&#x2F;large-l...</a><p>May be you could compete on price? Or what is your strategy?
chvidabout 9 years ago
Why do you care about the height and dob of a judge? (As present in the demo)
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grutalampaabout 9 years ago
This could work in other countries, without the need to change many details of the program, or is just an USA startup?
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