Initial Customer-generated Requirements
This document is intended only to provide a starting point from which you
will derive the requirements for a billing management tool. This tool will
be used by criminal defense attorneys who represent indigent defendants
in Washington, D.C. Clearly, these requirements must be expanded and deepened
before they will be useful.
Court-appointed Attorneys
Criminal defense attorneys representing indigent defendants are paid by
the court, and must submit their bills per case and per defendant represented.
These bills must be submitted in specific formats depending on the court
in which the cases are heard and (in some cases) the type of judicial procedure
involved.
Billing Management
The goal of this project is to build a billing management tool. The results
of this project will be made publicly available and it is our expectation
that working attorneys will download from the internet and use it to submit
bills to various courts operating in Washington, D.C.
The system must be able to do at least the following things:
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Configuration: The system must allow global information (such
as the cost per hour of an attorney's time) to be entered and changed.
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Data Entry: Attorneys must be able to enter data related to their
cases. Data management functions must also be supported - store, modify,
import and delete.
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Data Integrity Checking: The system must ensure that certain data
constraints are maintained (primarily checking for duplicate entries).
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Data Retrieval: The system must retrieve and summarize all data
needed to generate bills.
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Form Generation: The system must create bills using the appropriate
official forms. The attorney should be able to save electronic copies for
his or her personal records.
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Import Official Forms: The system must allow new forms to be added
for use.
Constraints:
Here are some constraints on your development of the project:
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The system must run in multiple environments (at least Windows and Unix).
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The system must be downloadable, installable, and usable by people who
may have very little knowledge of computers.
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The system must be usable and maintainable by people who did not develop
it. In particular, the system may not include or be built with software
that is not freely available.
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The system must allow data to be entered from several computing devices
(e.g., handheld devices and desktop computers).
A Typical Billing Scenario:
An example use of the billing system might be as follows:
A person is arrested and charged with a crime. The lawyer is appointed
to represent this person. The lawyer drives to the jail house, meets with
the person and talks with him or her for 45 minutes. The lawyer then opens
a case in the billing system. This case will be heard in the DC Superior
Court and it is a Trial. The lawyer then creates an expense record for
12 miles he or she drove to and from the jailhouse (this expense is categorized
as Time Spent Out of Court - Travel Time. Next, the lawyer enters an expense
record for the time spent talking to the client. This is entered as 45
minutes and categorized and Time Spent Out of Court - Interviews/Conferences.
Some Terminology
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DC Superior Court and Federal Court: There are two courts for which the
system will prepare bills.
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Billing format: Cases that are heard by the DC Superior Court will fall
into three categories: Trial, Appeal, and CCAN (Child Abuse and Neglect).
Each category has its own billing forms and billing procedures.
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Voucher: The bill.
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Work Time: Time spent working on the case. In certain cases it is reported
in minutes and in others it is reported as a time range (e.g., 10:45am
- 11:00am).
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Task categories: All work done on a case is classified into one of several
categories. These include: Inerviews/Conferences, Travel Time, Trial, Bail
Hearing, etc.
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Case Name: Name of an individual defendant.
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Docket Number: Unique identifier corresponding to a case.
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Voucher Number:
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Billing Summary: Various reports
Web Accessibility