If you’ve ever spent hours hunting down past rulings or struggled with clunky, outdated institutional websites, you’re not alone. Government bodies worldwide face the same challenge: How can you make case law or legislation readily available, easy to navigate, and fully transparent with limited resources and capacity?
The answer lies in adopting more efficient publishing solutions—just like the Colorado Supreme Court’s Office of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge (PDJ) did. This story might inspire your next move, especially if you manage or publish large volumes of legal content.
What is the PDJ – and Why Did It Turn to Decisia?
Established in 1999 as an independent tribunal, the Colorado’s PDJ oversees lawyer disciplinary cases in Colorado, along with matters related to attorney disability, unauthorized practice of law and certain bar admissions. The PDJ’s role is critical in maintaining ethical standards and public trust within the legal profession.
When Judge Bryon M. Large took the helm in June 2022, he doubled down on transparency:
“I firmly believe that confidence in the judiciary is fortified by public access to court records and procedural information.”
However, making decades’ worth of lawyer disciplinary rulings available to attorneys, journalists, and the public comes with challenges—manual conversions, disorganized archives, and time-consuming updates. To overcome these hurdles, the PDJ turned to Decisia, Lexum’s powerful solution designed to simplify and optimize the management and publication of legal information.
How Decisia Streamlined PDJ’s Workflows—One Feature at a Time
Decisia is Lexum’s advanced software solution, trusted by more than 100 courts, tribunals, councils, and agencies worldwide. By integrating Decisia to its website, the PDJ now benefits from a range of features designed to provide fast, simple, and open access to the law. Here’s how key features are improving their workflows:
One-Click Document Conversion
Decisia’s one-click document conversion functionality stands out as a highly effective tool for organizations such as the PDJ, streamlining the tedious process of handling various file formats. Manually converting documents into web-friendly formats not only slows down workflows but can also introduce inconsistencies and often requires extensive manual cleanup to meet accessibility standards. Decisia overcomes these hurdles by allowing users to upload documents through an intuitive administrative interface, where they are automatically converted into both HTML and PDF formats with no extra steps. But what truly sets Lexum’s solution apart is its unique WCAG-compliant filters for MS Word, which ensure that the HTML output is ADA compliant right from the start. This approach saves significant time and effort by eliminating the need for tedious manual adjustments at the end of the publishing process, resulting in faster publication, consistent output, and fully accessible content that meets industry standards—all while freeing staff from repetitive tasks and ensuring legal information is accessible to everyone.
Autofill Function
Another key feature that enhances the PDJ’s efficiency is Decisia’s autofill function. Managing large volumes of complex legal documents requires the accurate insertion of metadata—such as case names, neutral citations, case numbers, and dates—to ensure proper classification and searchability. Manual metadata entry can be both time-consuming and error-prone. To overcome this, the PDJ implemented Decisia’s autofill functionality, which automatically identifies and extracts relevant data from MS Word and PDF documents based on predefined templates. The extracted information is then pre-filled into Decisia’s publication interface, allowing content managers to simply review and confirm accuracy before secure storage in the database. This automated process ensures consistent, structured metadata, saving time, reducing manual errors, and providing faster, more reliable access to lawyer disciplinary rulings for all users.
Real-Time Monitoring
Legal content often requires updates, corrections, or additional clarifications, and keeping track of these changes can be daunting. Decisia makes tracking these changes seamless with detailed audit trails. Every time a document is modified, Decisia logs the update, recording who made the change, when it was made, and what was altered. This ensures full accountability and provides an official record of revisions, which is invaluable for institutions managing sensitive legal data. Moreover, Decisia’s version control feature allows users to quickly retrieve and restore previous versions of documents without losing any data. Should an error occur or an unintended change slip through, institutions can easily revert to an earlier version, maintaining the integrity and accuracy of their publications.
By leveraging these features, the PDJ has successfully launched a robust, transparent, and user-friendly database that enhances the public’s access to disciplinary rulings.
What This Means for End Users
With Decisia managing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, end users—including attorneys, law students, journalists, and the general public—reap significant benefits. For legal professionals, research becomes faster and more accurate; no longer burdened by outdated agency websites, they can instantly locate relevant rulings by filtering searches with dates, keywords, or citations. For journalists, timeliness and factual accuracy are paramount. Decisia’s advanced search capabilities enable them to find, verify, and summarize rulings quickly, allowing for faster, more accurate reporting—an essential advantage in today’s fast-paced news cycles. Additionally, Decisia supports RSS feeds for real-time updates—though the Colorado PDJ has not adopted them—so that journalists can be notified the moment new rulings are published. Another helpful tool for staying up-to-date is the “Recent Additions” feature, which compiles newly issued decisions, fresh translations, and recent corrections. The public, too, benefits from greater transparency and accessibility. Access to lawyer disciplinary rulings allows citizens to understand how ethical standards are upheld within the legal profession, fostering greater trust in the judiciary. With Decisia’s mobile-responsive design, users can conveniently access this information from anywhere—whether commuting, in court, or simply browsing at home.
Ultimately, the PDJ’s adoption of Decisia represents a win-win. For the PDJ, it means streamlined publication processes, reduced manual workloads, and optimized resource allocation. For users, it means fast, simple, and open access to legal information, empowering them with the knowledge they need, when they need it.
Ready to Explore?
Curious to see how it works? Visit ColoradoPDJ.com to access lawyer disciplinary rulings dating back to 1999. A simple, reliable resource—right at your users’ fingertips, whenever they need it.
A Little About Us at Lexum
Since 1992, we at Lexum have specialized in making legal information fast, simple, and open to all. Decisia is just one of the innovative tools in our suite of solutions for streamlining legal data management and publication. Interested in learning more about how we can help your organization? Head over to lexum.com or reach out to us directly. We’d love to show you how our solutions can make accessing legal information easier than ever.