3. Major Components of cause list

1.1. Bulk Entry Management

The vendor needs to develop a bulk cause-list upload and management system for the cause-list management Platform. Through this, the officer will be able to upload one or multiple cause lists at a time without any hassle.

Pre-format cause-list file: There should be a pre-format cause-list sheet for both subordinate courts and the high court. Users should pick the right format of file (CSV/Excel) for the respective court’s cause list.

Cause list system will provide the format. By clicking EXPORT sample format, users can have the formatted file that should be filled before importing it to the system.

After the bulk entry is successful, the officer will be able to view all the cases in the cause list. The cases should also be viewed by the concerned stakeholders (i.e., Litigants, Lawyers, Judges, etc.), and can be filtered by the viewer using several parameters.

3.2 . Digital Case Number

The case number is a unique number for the lawsuit. This number usually can be found on court documents regarding the case. The case number typically will be either a string of numbers or a combination of letters and numbers along with the year it was filled, often preceded by the indicator “Case No.” or “No.” For example, “No. 20916/2019”.

The process of cause list entry is different for supreme court and lower district courts. In lower court, the documents collected by the lawyer will first make its way to the Sheresta office.

When a person has a civil claim and go to the court to register a complaint, they become the plaintiff. The one against whom they are filing the suit will be the defendant. Before filing a suit, they have to be sure about 3 things: the location of their claim (For Territorial Jurisdiction), the monetary value of the claim (For Pecuniary Jurisdiction) and the subject matter of their claim.

Thereafter, the complaint including other necessary documents should be submitted before the concerned court officer, i.e., the Sheristadar who shall examine, inter alia, territorial and pecuniary jurisdiction and requisite court fees paid thereof.

After such examination he will put a case number of the suit and will enter the suit into a register which is called the register of the suits. The date of filing shall also be stamped on the complaint as soon as it is filed. When all the above procedures are completed, a civil suit starts its journey.

In lower courts, the Sheristadar will enter the case in the cause list. After the case hearing takes place, the cause list will be updated by the judge secretary (Munshi).

 

In the supreme court, the bench officer will send all the mention slips to "Bench O Degri" section for compilation. There they will compile all the documents and papers and send it to BG Press for publishing Cause list.

In the digitalized system, the bench officer will be responsible for the case entry. Each case will have a unique digital number by following the standard guidelines of the Bangladesh Judiciary System which is subject to further analysis

Decision: Decision will be

1. Pre-defined: In the case of predefined decisions, the cause number will be auto-filled with the unique number.
   
   
2. Custom: In the case of custom decisions, the Judiciary officer can input case numbers manually with general (case number/yyyy) format. Keep in mind this should be unique.

3.3  Case History

Users of the system should able to view the all-previous cases. Litigants and Lawyers should be able to view previous cases based on a particular date range. The case information from the start to the end of the case will be shown individually.

Litigants and lawyers will only be able to view the cases in which they are directly involved in. They will not be able to view cases un-related to them.

• Store data: Every entry of the cause list is either from the digital filing system- single entry or from bulk entry, all data will be saved in a database.
• Unique case number: Every entry there will have a unique number which will be considered a case number.
• Accessing data: From the system the user can view/access the stored data using a case number. The system will show the record of the case from the database.

3.4  Case Transfer

A case transfer is a process whereby a legal case that is before a court is transferred to another court. There are provisions in certain circumstances to transfer proceedings between the supreme, magistrate, and district courts.

A case may be transferred to another court that is outside the jurisdiction for many reasons. For example, courts often handle only felony or misdemeanor crimes.  If a case is transferred outside the jurisdiction that is receiving the grant funds because the charges were reduced or enhanced beyond what the court typically handles, then the case is eligible for transfer. Similarly, if the case is transferred outside the jurisdiction that is receiving grant funds because the case was filled in the wrong jurisdiction, the case will be transferred.

The system should have a provision of transferring the cases among the courts in the Cause-list Management system.

The system should have the provision to transfer cases in the following ways:

1. Automatic transfer: The case will be transferred to the court automatically if the Judiciary officer detects that the case is in the wrong court, wrong act, etc. The system will automatically transfer the respective case to the defined court (defined by the Judiciary officer)
2. Manual transfer: The lawyer can transfer a case from one court to another court if the lawyer faces any issue(s).

3.5  Notification Management

Notification interface will allow citizens to receive notifications (Email, SMS) regarding their cause-list schedule. Besides the default settings, CMS users will have the option to set a notification on/off, frequency change, and priority configuration and configure the way notification is received (email, system, and SMS). 

The platform will have several types of notification systems with configurable user groups like proactive notification, configurable push notification, and auto-notification for case status, users query, and so on.

• Service admins/CMS users will be able to customize notifications within steps of the notification manager.
• All kinds of SMS and email notifications are configured with the predefined decision when the service was created.

Number

A total of 10 notification will be visible in the notifications box at a time. The user will be able to 6 notifications at a time and the user would need to scroll to see the rest. If the user wants to see more, they can click on 'See all' to go to the 'all-notifications' page. It is likely that these numbers will vary between devices, based on the height user display -- and will be reduced for smaller screens.

Order

Notifications will be shown in reverse chronological order, with the latest notifications shown first, based on their timestamp. The most recent notifications will remain on the notification box until replaced by newer notifications, which will push them down the stack incrementally, until they fall off from the notification list. (The same ordering principle will be used in the all-notifications page, except that the list will be longer and separated by days: today, yesterday, all the way back to the past 7 days).

Scrollbar

A scrollbar in the notification box should be supported. This will be needed in order to see up to 10 items in the notification box, which will not all fit at once in the first view of the notification box.

Timestamp

The timestamp will be expressed as a 'time elapsed' indicator (e.g.: 1 min. ago, 2 hours ago, 3 days ago). It may only appear when the user hovers over the notification, to reduce clutter.

Push Notification

Push notification will allow litigants or judicial officials to receive notification text messages on their phone numbers registered in the system. This way, users can receive notifications even if they are not connected to the internet.

3.6 Cause list publisher

• Publishing: After creating a cause-list by using the case entry(from manual, bulk, or digital filing), the Judiciary admin will publish to a shared repository (i.e., Judiciary portal, dashboard, etc.)
• Auto-generated API: API to access the shared cause-list will be auto-generated once published.
• Accessing the published cause-list: Cause list system admins can access the published Cases’ APIs to make use of shared Cause-list in their systems for decision support among users. The publicly shared cause list will be shown by all types of users through a web portal.

3.7  Advanced Searching

There will be provision for viewing latest update of cause-list for citizen as well as judiciary officers. Case Status can be searched by various options like Case Number, Party Name, Filing Number, Relevant Act of the Case and Case Type. Initial search result of case status is displayed with Case Number and names of parties. User will be able to search cause-list through their mobile number, case number etc. which is subject to further analysis.