BUSINESS PROPOSAL AND MARKETING PLAN Digidocket s best opportunity for expansion. Another experiment by : 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents...3 Purpose...4 Mission Statement.5 Product Description....6 Market Information......10 Costs and Revenue.......11 Expansion....13 FAQs..14 Who we are......16 3
PURPOSE Some lawyers in North Carolina are frustrated with the North Carolina Court System. The lawyers who are frustrated do not believe the North Carolina Court System is as transparent as it should be. These lawyers are frustrated because the Court System is not providing them with digitized court records from the district and superior court level, which are crucial in building a case and performing legal research. Retrieving records from the North Carolina Court System is outdated, time-consuming and costly for most lawyers. Over 2 million court cases are filed in North Carolina s courts on an annual basis. However copies of the district and superior courts are only available in paper format. Recipients of court records can only receive copies of these records by going to the courthouse in the county where the document was filed, search for the file number on outdated computer software and pay for a photocopy of that file. This process is not only inefficient and frustrating, but it is also years behind other states and national standards. According to Lynn Lopucki, law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, a court system can only become transparent once its records are made available in relational electronic format. Despite attempts, North Carolina has yet to do so for all of its court records. Providing these records is costly and the judicial branch of North Carolina is underfunded. Digidocket was born to improve transparency in the North Carolina Court System without waiting for the state to take action. 4
MISSION STATEMENT Digidocket aspires to improve transparency in the North Carolina court system by making legal research easier and faster, providing relevant data from district and superior court levels, and bettering the technological landscape and infrastructure of the North Carolina judicial system. 5
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION Digidocket is a legal tool that digitally archives and electronically provides copies of all North Carolina district and superior court records. It is a searchable, online database that assists lawyers in legal research. It provides electronic copies of the actual court records as well as data analytics and a notification alert system. Using Digidocket. Digidocket is a subscription, membership-based service. Before users can access our research tool, they have to subscribe to our product. The subscription is based on a yearly contract that has to be renewed every year. It is $2,400 subscription fee ($200/month) that requires login information and profile settings. The login and 6
profile settings allow for each user to have a personalized experience with Digidocket. Once users have logged in, they have the ability to search for a court record by case name, case number, party names and case type (felony, civil case, etc.) on the homepage. The homepage also allows users to narrow searches down by selecting a category from the category menu. Digidocket also allows for users to sign up for a email notification on this landing page. Users can identify what cases they want notifications about once specific records have been uploaded to our database. For example, if a journalist wants copies of John Doe s search warrant once it is added to his file and our database, he/she can get a copy of the record as soon as possible as opposed to waiting in the courthouse for the physical search warrant. After searching for a court record, the user will be able to select the court record they want from the search results. Selecting the desired court record will then bring the user to the record profile, which has an electronic of the desired court record, a table 7
with key information (assigned judicial official, arresting agency, arresting officer, date file, case file number and case result) and a timeline. The timeline shows how long a particular case took to matriculate through the court system from initial incident to the last ruling. It also acts as a digital docket, or case index, allowing users to see what was filed and when it was filed. Testing Digidocket. To create the prototype iteration of Digidocket, we took a 10-page-per-minute scanner to the Chatham County Justice Center. The superior clerk allowed us into the archive stacks located in the clerk s office in order to select files to scan. This scanner was able to scan over 60 court files over a 10-hour period, scanning hundreds of pages of paper. In each of the three trips, civil dispute files, criminal district files or criminal superior files were scanned and added to the Digidocket database. The prototype has amassed feedback that has both supported the idea and offered constructive criticism of the database. Over the course of 12 weeks, 41 lawyers offered direct feedback about Digidocket. Thirty-three of these 41 lawyers supported the idea of Digidocket. Another 22 lawyers were able interact with the prototype; 20 said that Digidocket will make their job easier. Most of these lawyers praised Digidocket for its value-added, handiness, helpfulness, even calling it a giant step forward in the North Carolina Court System. However, some of the critiques included increasing the search functionality, privacy concerns and redaction of private information and improving categorization, perhaps modeling Digidocket after the national legal research tool, PACER. A poll was sent to more than three hundred lawyers in North Carolina. A majority of those polled said they need the documents 2-3 days after they're filed. The searchability of the cases was a big hit, and so was the timeline feature we added. Those surveyed loved how the timeline functioned as a sort of case docket, or table of contents, since most of the files don't have one. Additionally, customers loved the PDF of the file because it's the same as the actual file, but it's also searchable, downloadable, and convenient. 8
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION In terms of the process of running Digidocket, we will send one person and a 20 page per minute scanner to each courthouse in North Carolina. Once at the courthouse, the scanner person will scan each piece of paper that comes into the clerk s office before it is given to the clerk s assistants to be physically filed. With 2.5 million files added to the court system each year, that averages out to about 100 new court files to be scanned in each county per day, or about 25 hours of work per week per county. The scanned copy of the file will automatically be sent to our database where it will be digitally prepared for publishing on the website. Although eventually we hope to be scanning files at all of the 100 counties in North Carolina, we plan to start in three counties. Right now, we are planning Wake, Orange and Chatham Counties because these three counties give us a good sample of a large, medium, and small county in terms of volume of files. Nevertheless, with more exploration and research, it might be necessary to change the counties we start in depending on what counties lawyers tell us are the most important or valuable to them. The digital preparations include running the scan through an optical character recognition (OCR) program, which makes the scanned files searchable by keyword, grouping the page with its corresponding file number, and picking out previously decided-upon important information. 9
MARKET INFORMATION 1 There are more than 20,000 active lawyers in North Carolina. Court records allows lawyers to gather information about laws or legal rulings that have established precedential value, to get all pertinent information needed to build a case and to perform legal research. In fact 94 percent of attorneys said that they perform legal research in a 2013 2 study performed by the American Association of Law Libraries. The same study showed that legal research can take up to 75 percent of lawyers time. Ninety-two percent of attorneys use fee-based databases to assist with their research, with 44 percent of lawyers using these resources very frequently. Sixty-three percent of attorneys said they were using new legal research platforms at the time of the survey. As a result of these findings, there is a viable market for lawyers in North Carolina. 1 Moxley, Tracie. "ABA National Lawyer Population Survey." National Lawyer Population by State 2015 (2015): n. pag. American Bar Association. American Bar Association. Web. <http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/market_research/national-lawye r-population-by-state-2015.authcheckdam.pdf>. 2 NEVELOW MART, SUSAN, and ALL-SIS Task Force. "RCH SKILLS." (2013): 1-94. American Association of Law Libraries. American Association of Law Libraries, June 2013. Web. <http://www.aallnet.org/sections/all/storage/committees/practicetf/final-report-07102013.pdf>. 10
COSTS AND REVENUE The initial start up costs for Digidocket will be $23,000 which will include the costs to buy scanners, software, and to set up a website to host our database. It costs roughly $35000 a year per county to run Digidocket depending on the size of the county. Main operating costs come from personnel to retrieve the court records, marketing costs, and management for Digidocket. We found the costs for our equipment by researching what we would need to provide adequate and efficient service. We decided personnel costs by looking at the median salaries for workers in marketing and assistant paralegals. Website costs were estimated through consultation with developers. Digidocket will be run on a subscription basis where customers will have unlimited access to Digidocket s service for $2400 a year. There is no marginal cost to add customers so Digidocket will be marketed to attract as many customers as possible. To attract these customers we will hire a full time marketer to work for Digidocket. We are budgeting $48,000 a year for marketing costs. This money will be spent to create partnerships with the North Carolina State Bar Association, attending trade shows, advertisements, trials, and other marketing costs. We know that $2400 is a reasonable 11
price because of what many lawyers have told us during our research. We ve learned that lots of lawyers are already paying more than $2400 for inferior service. Through our conversations with these lawyers they ve told us that $2400 is a price that will be affordable and attractive for many lawyers. Our goal is to have about 30 customers subscribed by the end of Year One. We plan to run Digidocket is a beta testing stage where we could allow lawyers access to test Digidocket and then usher them in as paying customers once we fully launch Digidocket. 12
EXPANSION The database is currently populated with 60 court records from the Chatham County Justice Center. Because Digidocekt s cost structure is scalable, we are planning to expand Digidocket to every county in the state. Our initial expansion will include records from Orange and Wake counties. There are more than 600 litigators in Raleigh alone, so we believe that their is a market in Wake county that will support our immediate expansion efforts. As we move to include more counties, we are also looking to improve the research tools that our database offers by year six. These tools would include expert witness analysis, judge profiles and probability of winning or losing a case (based on retroactively analyzing court records). Expansion will allow Digidocket to be made available cheaply to other entities, including journalists, individual citizens, etc. 13
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 1. Why are you helping lawyers? First, lawyers represent the people of North Carolina. For the 2.5 million court files produced every year, lawyers play a huge part in representing the people, so helping lawyers helps the people also. Second, it s not free to scan and analyze all the records, and lawyers are the ones with the means to pay. Eventually, we hope to have enough paying customers to be able to lower the price so that journalists, citizens, and anyone else would be able to afford Digidocket. 2. Why are you charging for something we could get for free? We are charging for the convenience of getting the files you need when and where you need them. It s free to look at the court files in the courthouse, but to get copies of the court files, you must pay two dollars for the first page plus 25 cents for each additional page. This alone gets expensive, but then the costs of time and gas to get to the courthouse (which could be three counties over) can add up to over $6000 for law firms. 3. How are you going to stop people from sharing their accounts? There are many different methods to stop people from sharing their accounts. For example, lawyers could log in with their Bar Association number, or they could be limited to three IP addresses from which they could access the database. 4. How are you going to deal with the privacy issues? We are working with a law librarian at the UNC School of Law whose main concern is the privacy of sensitive information. One way to protect the sensitive information is to redact it in the digital versions of the files. Another way the privacy is protected is by the paywall and the limited access to the database by lawyers. This way, any average Joe Shmo can t access any private information that might be in the database. 5. How are you increasing transparency if there s such a big paywall and normal citizens can t get access? Lawyers are the ones who use court records the most often, they can pay, and they represent the public, so they are Digidocket s target market. Since the documents are in digital format, they are easier for lawyers to get ahold of, so the 14
lawyer who previously had to drive to all the different courthouses can now get all the same documents and more with a few simple searches of the database. 6. How are you planning to get your initial customers? While researching Digidocket, we tested our prototype with lawyers in North Carolina. Using the NCAJ.com directory, we compiled a listserv of over 300 names, email addresses, and phone numbers, and we only went through less than half of the directory list. Additionally, there are over 23,000 lawyers in North Carolina, and many of them communicate through listservs, so as people begin to adopt our product, they will also spread it through word of mouth. 7. What kinds of files are you including? We re including civil and criminal district and superior court files in North Carolina. 8. Why hasn t anyone done this already? The North Carolina judicial system is severely understaffed and underfunded, and technology-wise, it s still stuck in the 1990s. They don t yet have the motivation to spend the time and the money to revamp the system. Likewise, Digidocket s national competitors like Lexis Nexis and WestLaw don t want to spend the resources to scan the files either. Instead, they take the already-digitized files and put them into their systems. 15
WHO WE ARE Emily Gregoire, of Greenville, S.C., is a junior studying business administration and graphic design at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the managing editor of the Well-Being Magazine and is also actively involved in Alpha Kappa Psi co-ed professional business fraternity at UNC. She loves making information graphics and computer illustrations. She aspires to work in the graphics department at a major publication or as an in-house graphic designer at a large corporation. Jonathan Morris is a senior from Wilmington, N.C., who studies Economics and Journalism. He is president of Christians at Kenan-Flagler and is involved with his local church. He loves traveling, surfing and playing sports. He is hoping to pursue a career with a media or tech company post graduation. Janell Smith is a senior from Brandywine, Md., studying Journalism and Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Janell has dedicated most of her time at college to involvement in the APPLES Service-Learning program. She is also enthusiastically involved with campus ministries at UNC. Some of her favorite pastimes include crafting, reading and crocheting. Upon graduation, Janell will spend two years working with the Peace Corps., before beginning her reporting career. 16