Case management where the data is the sensitive part.
A corporate investigation firm needed one system for cases, clients, investigators and evidence, built to a standard that would survive scrutiny of how the data was handled, not just what it contained.
Sensitive work spread across tools nobody could vouch for.
Case material, client correspondence, investigator notes and field evidence were distributed across email, shared drives and personal devices. For most businesses that is untidy. For an investigation firm it is an existential problem, because the value of the work depends on being able to demonstrate how the material was handled.
Field investigators were the hardest part. They work alone, off-site, often at unsociable hours, and the record of what they did and when was whatever they wrote up afterwards.
Access needed to be granular. An investigator on one case should not see another, a client should see their own matters and nothing else, and administrative staff need enough to run the business without reading the case files.
One module-structured system, with the access model designed first.
We built a modular platform, case, client, investigator, employee and sales-marketing management, with system and user administration; on a database structured so that cross-module reporting is possible without any module being able to read another's data directly.
Hybrid mobile applications for iOS and Android put the field investigator inside the system, not reporting into it afterwards. Case time is tracked as it happens and multi-layered GPS tracking records where field work took place.
Interactive dashboards give each role its own view: case load and deadlines for investigators, matter status for client-facing staff, utilisation and pipeline for management.
Because the users were not software people and the system replaced habits rather than tools, we built the tutorials into the product, not shipping a manual nobody would read.
Seven modules, one access model.
Case management
The core record. Status, assignment, deadlines, notes and evidence, visible strictly to the people on the matter.
Client management
Matters, correspondence and the reporting each client receives, scoped so a client sees only their own.
Investigator management
Assignment, availability, case load, and the field record of where time was actually spent.
Employee management
Roles, permissions and the administrative side of the business, deliberately separated from case content.
Sales and marketing
Pipeline and enquiry handling, so commercial staff can work without access to live case material.
GPS and time tracking
Multi-layered location recording and case time capture from the mobile app, contemporaneous, not reconstructed.
Audit and MIS reporting
Cross-module reporting built on the same permission model, so a report cannot leak what a screen would not show.
Built with confidentiality as a structural property.
Application
Mobile
Field
Reporting
What the business got.
- Case material stopped living in email. One system of record, with the handling of it demonstrable rather than asserted.
- Field work became contemporaneous. GPS and time capture from the mobile app replaced write-ups produced hours later from memory.
- Access is enforced structurally, not by convention. The permission model sits under both the screens and the reports, so there is no reporting back door around it.
- Reporting without exposure. Management can see utilisation, pipeline and case throughput without anyone needing access to case content to produce the numbers.
- Adoption without a training programme. In-product tutorials meant a workforce that had been using email and paper moved onto the system without a formal rollout.
