Supreme Court
of Ohio

The Challenge

Ohio citizens seeking information about Supreme Court cases — oral argument schedules, published opinions, bar admission records, attorney discipline — were navigating a public website that hadn't been significantly redesigned in over a decade. Search functionality was basic keyword matching. Mobile rendering was broken on most modern devices. Accessibility complaints under the ADA were logged quarterly.

Internally, the Court's administrative staff was managing the case docket, document workflow, and attorney status records across three separate systems, none of which shared a data model. Pulling a case history for a judicial conference required manual aggregation across all three.

The requirements were uncompromising: zero downtime during the migration, full accessibility compliance, state IT security standards (including CJIS-adjacent data handling protocols), and a public-facing design that conveyed the dignity and authority appropriate to the state's highest court.

The Solution

We architected a dual-track delivery: the public portal and the internal case management system could be built and tested in parallel because they share a data layer but have completely separate access controls and UI surfaces.

The public portal was designed with a content-first approach — the Court's opinions, rules, and docket information are the product. Typography, hierarchy, and search were the primary design decisions. We used a statically-generated front-end backed by a managed search index (Meilisearch) to achieve sub-100ms full-text search across thousands of published opinions and docket entries.

The internal case management tool was designed in close collaboration with the Court's administrative staff — running weekly working sessions where we watched staff perform their actual workflows and identified every friction point before designing solutions. Every 48-hour cycle, a new build was in their hands for testing.

What We Built

• Public Case Search Portal — full-text search across opinions, orders, and docket entries with filters for case type, date range, justice authorship, and topic area. Results render in under 80ms. Indexed nightly from the case management system.
• Opinion Publishing System — a structured authoring and publication workflow for court opinions: draft entry, internal review routing, metadata tagging, and one-click publication to the public portal with automatic PDF generation.
• Oral Argument Calendar — public-facing schedule of upcoming oral arguments with case summaries, participating attorneys, and livestream links. ICS export for calendar subscriptions. Updated in real time when cases are scheduled or continued.
• Attorney Directory & Status — searchable directory of Ohio-registered attorneys with real-time bar status, admission date, discipline history, and CLE compliance status. Sourced live from the Court's attorney registry.
• Internal Docket Management — a unified case management interface for administrative staff: filing tracking, document workflow, status updates, and a chronological docket view per case. Replaced all three legacy systems.
• Role-Based Access Control — granular permission tiers for clerks, justices' staff, IT administrators, and read-only auditors. All access logged with immutable audit trail.
• Disaster Recovery Architecture — multi-region deployment with automated failover, daily encrypted backups, and a tested recovery time objective (RTO) of under 15 minutes — meeting Ohio state IT requirements for critical government systems.

Results