The Paperless Prosecutor

I wanted everyone to have the option of viewing their court dockets using Outlook’s Calendar. All the hearings are scheduled in our case management system, (Kansas Prosecutor System) and that application allows us to save the court docket schedule as a comma separated value (csv) or Excel spreadsheet file. Once the court docket is in a spreadsheet, it’s pretty simple to rearrange the data in a way that takes advantage of the fields used by an Outlook calendar.

The data in the judge and courtroom columns are combined into a new column under a header named “Location”. The Case Number, Defendant Name and Hearing Type columns are all combined into a new column under a header named “Subject.” Finally, the filepath to our digital case file is constructed and combined with the data in the Attorney column under a header named “Description.”

An Excel macro takes care of all the data manipulation, and then splits out each prosecutor’s docket into a separate spreadsheet. Then I go to Outlook and import each prosecutor’s docket to update their Outlook calendar. Right now I’m doing the import step manually. It only takes about five minutes to accomplish the entire process for all 6 prosecutors, but when I get time I hope to create an Outlook macro to automate the importation of the hearings from the spreadsheets into Outlook.

With all the court hearings loaded into Outlook, it was a snap to sync up my Outlook calendar with my Google calendar using Google Calendar Sync. Now I can see all my upcoming hearings from anywhere I have an internet connection. And if I add an event to the Google calendar, it’s automatically added to my Outlook calendar.