Court Filing Ingestion/Extraction Revamp

Description:
Revamp Reorg’s legacy Court Filing Ingestion tools and processes supporting 100M in revenue
Business Objective:
Update the internal tools managing scraping of court cases to reduce wasted manual effort, and improve the scrapers to reduce pacer fees and outages without affecting downstream workflows and the client experience
My Role:
Senior Product Manager
Company:
Reorg
Launch Date:
August 2024

Strategy and Background

Reorg’s initial founding products were all based on ingestion of court filings, extracting structured data from court filings, as well as reporting on court filings and court proceedings. Dozens of products and the majority of Reorg’s revenue has some connection to these scraped documents from the Pacer court filing system. The scrapers for retrieving information and the internal tools for managing court dockets and filings were hard to maintain, slow, costly to run, and had been extended haphazardly over time.

As part of a value creation plan agreed upon with Reorg Executive Leadership Team, it was determined that a revamp of this system was a top priority. I was brought in to lead the business design of the UI/UX and to ensure overall project success.

I carried out extensive discovery with the Reorg operations team and the developers maintaining the current system to understand current features as well as major pain points in the current workflows.

The Plan

  • Create an all new UI/UX for managing court cases and filings in order to drastically simplify setup and management.
  • Update the data-input tools used to enter in extracted case data
  • Update all the client and internal notifications to provide deep linking into the platform to improve experience and save time
  • Revamp the pacer scrapers and scraping logic to reduce scraping costs and eliminate logic gaps

Execution

  • Conducted extensive discovery and user research to understand current workflows of business operations team, application support, and developers
  • Detailed requirements for a new UI/UX that reduced the number of pages required to complete work in half while maintaining all existing required features
  • Collaborated with a designer to create mockups and prototypes in Figma and gathered feedback from operations team
  • Worked closely with the data engineering team as the voice of the user to help improve the business logic around scraping
  • Worked with QA to define and signoff on test plans
  • Coordinated between Dev and QA to review work in progress, write bug tickets, and ensure work was following the established requirements and mockups
  • Coordinated with product strategy to lead two rounds of UAT testing that brought business users into test environments for signoff on the new tooling
  • Utilized SQL to run extensive tests on data migrated through ETL flows as well as validate the new scraping logic
  • Established a roadmap for future improvements to the UI/UX and scraping logic to further reduce scraping costs and manual workflows


Project Results:

  • Project resulted in a drastically improved UI/UX that cut time to complete common workflows by 50%
  • Scraping costs were reduced by at least 25% immediately, with another 25% expected with additional planned improvements
  • Downstream dependent tools and workflows were not negatively affected
  • Project praised as a major success by key stakeholders and CEO on All Hands Call post-release

“he knocked it out of the park.”

Dan led the effort to rebuild the single most important tool for my team’s daily workflow and, at the same time, made the end product we provide a better experience for customers. The platform is seamless and intuitive (saving us time), functions efficiently (saving the firm money), gives us access to more data to make more decisions (adding value) and–on top of all that–it’s a pleasure to use! He was obsessive about understanding what we actually needed in order to deliver the best product on Day 1. And he knocked it out of the park. I was grateful to have someone so smart and personable working so closely with me on such an important project.
Ben B.
Senior Editorial Operations Manager @ Reorg

“I was able to complete my work at a fast pace because of his support”

I worked as a software engineer with Dan on a project spanning a year, involving the overhaul of a legacy data ingestion and content management system that provides core functionality to Reorg’s business operations.

Dan’s ability to translate complex business requirements into actionable items enabled everyone from developers to QA to focus on their respective tasks instead of having to reach out to others for clarification. I was able to complete my work at a fast pace because of his support, and his meticulous attention to detail ensured correct implementation without missing any requirements.

We frequently had technical discussions about how features should be implemented and what tradeoffs would be involved, and because of this he was able to foresee potential issues and unblock tasks before I even was able to get started on them.

Dan’s calm and friendly demeanor was very refreshing for such a fast paced and demanding environment. He is a skilled product manager who is able to drive projects forward under tight deadlines and I would recommend him for any product management role.
Trevor H
Lead Developer @ Reorg

“his dedication and attention to detail were truly exceptional”

I had the pleasure of working with Dan for over a year, and his dedication and attention to detail were truly exceptional. He consistently went the extra mile to ensure our internal tools met the highest standards, always prioritizing quality and user experience. Dan’s passion and commitment to getting things right and ability to translate user needs into effective solutions make him an invaluable product manager to any team!
Cici G
Director, Product Strategy @ Reorg