Litigation Support - department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow GitHub Wiki

Overview

The Litigation Support team handles congressional inquiries, motions (pre- and post-decisional), CAVC remands, and responds to status inquiries on BVA cases. We call them "the department of edge cases" because they handle complex appeals scenarios for attorneys, judges, and employees at BVA.

We started defining Caseflow requirements with the Lit Support team in early 2019. We spoke with them in mid-2018 as part of a "discovery" phase of work. The Lit Support team is among one of the last known teams who received a Queue and will work in Caseflow. Prior to AMA implementation, the BVA Chairman prioritized tracking Congressional Inquiries in Caseflow. Motions weren't part of our pre-AMA scope because the volume of motions for AMA cases will be relatively low until more RAMP/AMA decisions are issued.

Purpose

The purpose of this work is to allow the Lit Support team to track CAVC remands, motions, and congressional inquiries in Caseflow.

How we got started

  1. When met with several teams at BVA for an initial Caseflow discovery phase to understand who they are and what they do. We met with Josh, Nina, Samuel, and Theo in August of 2017 and spoke with them about their work.
  2. In January 2019, we conducted a workshop with Kate (a new Lit Support detailee) and Nina to understand what changed about their work since 2017 and how Caseflow could support them in an AMA world. The goal of the workshop was to collect as much information about their current pain points as possible and validate flows that we started to document their process. Within the design team, this "kicked off" our work.
  3. In conjunction with the Lit Support team, we continued to document their workflows so that we could ensure that Caseflow could fully support them. Since Motions for Reconsideration are the most common motion type at BVA, we started by documenting a detailed flow for this motion. As this was the "core path", we used this flow as a jumping off point for design and for understanding other motion types. To view the detailed flow, search "Lit Support: Motions for Reconsideration" in Mural.
  4. When wrapped up our discovery work and defined user stories based on the requirements based on what we learned from the Lit Support team and how we knew Caseflow could make their workflow more efficient. We challenged the way that current Lit Support processes should translate to Caseflow, knowing that VACOLS had limitations. For our complete set of user stories, see the user stories section of #8547.
  5. We put together designs and InVision prototypes based on this initial set of stories and conducted usability testing with Nina, Kate, and a Motions Attorney.
  1. After testing designs, we synthesized our findings. To view our findings, search "Lit Support Usability Testing Synthesis" in Mural.
  2. We tweaked our user stories to better represent what we learned doing testing. Given that we had several different user stories, we broke them into three phases, an MVP, phase 2, and phase 3. Our MVP represented the minimum Caseflow functionality we felt that Lit Support could have to do their work.

Who was involved

Some of the Lit Support team members that we spoke with in 2017 have moved on to other departments of BVA. Our most recent phase of work involved:

  • Litigation Support team: Kate, Nina, Lauren (Motions Attorney), Keturah (Branch Chief)
  • Caseflow Queue team: Sneha, Eric, Allyce (Design); Marvo and Lauren (Product), Anya, Fareez, and Moncef (Engineering)

User stories

Our users stories shift and evolve as we understand what our MVP is. For the latest user stories and phases of work, see #8547.

Timeline

  • In June of 2019, designer Geronimo picked up Litigation Support work focused around motions - worked with Nichole for about a month and then later on with Rutvi officially. Along the journey, ticket #8547 was broken up into 3 separate epics based on priority by the Board. 1) Motion to Vacate 2) Motion for Reconsideration 3) Clear and Unmistakeable error. Due to the discovery of the complexity of work, Motion to Vacate was the primary focus from July to the end of February. The primary intent was to build the Motion to Vacate workflow as MVP as possible using repeatable and generic components from the existing Judge and Attorney checkout flows.