Azure API Management & UDC helps US Courts manage hearings seamlessly

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Microsoft and Tech Unicorn partnered to enable digital transformation and remote hearing procedures for courts around the world. The aim was to build digital solutions that would allow judges and court staff to perform all their daily tasks in an efficient and compliant manner, within a secure virtual environment.

The Superior Courts of Los Angeles embraced the modern courtroom design by integrating their operational workflows on Microsoft Teams through Unicorn Digital Courtroom. This included leveraging Azure Communication Services to efficiently connect courts with external parties, including attorneys, litigants, interpreters, and any relevant justice partners.

The digital courtroom enables seamless courtroom moderation, through a single Microsoft Teams link that can be utilized by court staff to view their daily schedule and manage their workflow, while managing the movement of participants in the courtroom. It also features configurable dashboards that display application usage, attendance, and hearing details, which highlights opportunities to optimize courtroom operations.

UDC facilitates a configurable live stream functionality that allows court staff to live-stream hearings for all users in the virtual gallery. The gallery feature offers a complete, unified and intuitive experience for relevant parties of the case and attorneys, who join hearings remotely, by providing a separate pre-hearing experience that simulates a physical courtroom hallway. In addition, it provides a channel for parties of the case and attorneys to connect, chat and call each other. It also has a link-related case function for the judge on Microsoft Teams, that provides access to case information from within the hearing screen. Furthermore, the release of feedback and survey cards within the hearing experience enables court staff to seamlessly capture and evaluate user feedback.

Modernize your infrastructure & innovate with APIs

With Unicorn Digital Courtroom, we leverage Azure to create a unified web experience, incorporating both Azure API Management and Azure Functions for critical parts of our infrastructure. Calls to back-end services reach Azure API Management, which gives UDC a single endpoint and API gateway into its back-end services and systems. With this functionality in place, other development teams at Tech Unicorn can work on modernizing the back-end services behind the gateway, in a way that remains transparent to our client’s front-end app.

Tech Unicorn ensures that clients can leverage tools, such as Azure Functions and Azure API Management, to create an API architecture that ensures that all APIs are monitored, managed, and secure. Rethinking the API approach by incorporating serverless technologies, has helped them to unlock new capabilities within an organization that are not limited by scale, cost, or operational resources.