Summary

Architected and delivered near-real-time video to stenographers for all 250 NSW courtrooms, replacing a paper workflow that had put enormous pressure on the transcribers to deliver the day's minutes within a single hour of court closing.

Situation

Before this project, NSW courts ran entirely on paper and stenography. For high-profile cases - murder trials and other serious matters - barristers preparing for the next day's hearing needed the minutes of today's session as soon as possible. Because minutes were produced serially by on-site stenographers and physically carried out of the courtroom, delivery had to be complete by 6PM even though courts only closed at 5PM. The stenographers effectively had one hour to finish the day's work, which was extremely stressful.

The NSW Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) had scoped a modernisation, aiming to replace this paper workflow with a digital video-based one that would let multiple stenographers work in parallel and let barristers re-watch sessions directly.

Tasks

• Architect the ingest, indexing and metadata platform that would sit behind DCJ's capture and client systems.
• Deliver near-real-time availability of courtroom video so stenographers could start transcribing within minutes, from anywhere, in parallel.
• Make videos and transcripts searchable and discoverable across all 250 courtrooms.
• Lead a small delivery team end-to-end across a 2.5 year engagement.

Actions

Stephan was engaged via IntelligenceBank as Architect and Delivery Manager, leading a team of 3 developers and 1 tester to build a significant amount of custom development on top of the IntelligenceBank platform for the DCJ tenant.

The architecture split cleanly between the two organisations: DCJ owned the cameras in each of the 250 courtrooms and the network path - video was streamed over AWS Direct Connect into dedicated, highly secured, S3 buckets. DCJ also owned the client-facing applications that stenographers and barristers actually used day-to-day. IntelligenceBank owned everything in between.

The custom work delivered on the IntelligenceBank side included:

• S3 ingest and detection: monitoring the buckets for newly-arrived courtroom video and kicking off the processing pipeline automatically.
• Metadata extraction into JSON, written back to S3 alongside the media so everything was co-located and durable.
• A transcript upload path that accepted minutes produced by the stenographers and auto-linked them to the correct video via the metadata.
• A metadata API that exposed everything back to the DCJ client systems so stenographers and barristers could search, open and re-watch sessions inside the tools they already used.
• A significant uplift to the security posture of the DCJ tenant, appropriate to the sensitivity of court material.

Results

The project was successfully completed and handed over in September 2020.

• All 250 NSW courtrooms live on the platform.
• 94% of hearings streamed through the system.
• Video available to stenographers within ~5 minutes of being recorded - down from the old model where nothing could move until the session physically ended and paper was carried out.
• Stenographers could work in parallel, from anywhere, instead of being a serial on-site bottleneck.
• Barristers could re-watch sessions directly, making traditional written minutes largely redundant for next-day preparation.
• Not a single glitch reported after go-live.
• Strongly positive feedback from DCJ, stenographers and barristers alike.