The big-picture goal of the Document Assembly Line project is to establish a national, sustainable document assembly and e-filing infrastructure for courts and legal-aid organizations. Here are some of the highlights of our work over the last three months of 2024 that move us closer to achieving that goal.
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E-filing developer!
Software engineer Ary A. joined the LIT Lab’s core team in November! Her focus will be on maintaining, updating, and expanding the Document Assembly Line’s e-filing tools so more courts can use them.
Ary’s work will include:
- A flexible, general-purpose e-filing tool
- ECF 5 compliance
- Improvements to interview e-filing configuration
Development roadmap
We recently published our development roadmap for the Document Assembly Line to share our plans and priorities with community members and funding partners. Like the Document Assembly Line itself, the roadmap is under development.
The roadmap is shaped primarily by David’s and Quinten’s vision for the Document Assembly Line, and by the community’s needs. That won’t change, but we recognize that our court partners want to help shape the roadmap, too, so we are working on a process for gathering their input, too.
Court partnerships & funding
In early September we received funding from a Legal Services Corporation (LSC) Technology Initiative Grant through Legal Services Vermont. This allowed us to hire an e-filing developer and share our roadmap.
Thank you to all the current funders who make the Document Assembly Line possible!
- State Justice Institute
- Massachusetts Trial Court
- Legal Services Corporation & Legal Services Vermont
We are actively working on finalizing funding from several other state courts. Hopefully that means we will have more good news to share in the 2025 Q1 update!
Community workshops
The two workshops we held this quarter covered community-sourced interview project management and automated testing:
You can view recordings of our workshops on the LIT Blog, and we’ve collected them in a playlist on our YouTube channel. If you want to be notified of upcoming workshops, you can sign up using the form at the top of our workshops blog posts.
Interview-building trainings coming soon
Next year we plan to offer a limited series of trainings for first-time interview builders at courts and legal aid organizations. people who have never used Docassemble before. If you are interested you can sign up to be notified.
Software updates
Quinten added a background processing feature to the core AssemblyLine package in version 3.2. This option allows interview developers to move resource-intensive document assembly to a background task. For interviews with very large documents to assemble this may make the interview feel more responsive to the user. For more information, see the feature documentation.
Quinten also improved the spam filter on the feedback package in version 0.4.1 to catch some of the more obvious spam submissions we’ve seen.
Michelle has started working on adding constrained random input tests to ALKiln, the Document Assembly Line’s automated testing component.
As usual, there were also a number of maintenance updates. For more detailed release notes, see these links.