Bringing case management into the 21st century

by Bart Holzer

We’ve all been there – facing a ton of information and wondering how to make heads or tails of it. We likely see that scenario for the first time while in school. Some of us face the challenge of data every day of our careers. For me, I began my career supporting federal law enforcement in the early days of the Internet. As the Internet became part of our everyday lives, new technologies brought huge amounts of data that agents needed to build their cases. I remember helping to build the systems to collect and manage the explosion of information.

I met Craig, my partner and Compendia, Inc. co-founder, more than 20 years after starting my career. I was floored by the challenges that remained in case file management outside of the federal environment in which I had operated for so long.

Craig painted a picture of how an investigator comes into a case. You’re working toward solving a real-life riddle but drowning in paper files and digital folders with files of all different formats. Your time and resources are limited. You must review more than 50,000 pages of case file information to get up to speed. These pages include critical information like witness statements, crime scene photos, forensics, and lab reports. If you want to collaborate with a colleague or peer at another agency, you might email select pages or mail a USB drive with some of the information, but not all, because it takes too long to digitize. You take notes in a Word Doc, but have no systematic way of cataloging and correlating all your findings. It would be – and is – daunting.

Craig had created a process and a unique technology to tackle the challenge of tedious, analog case file management. His process and systems helped solve and prosecute dozens of cases. And now colleagues were asking him to share his secret to such successful cases. Craig had the process and the system under control, but needed help scaling and securing the technology to share with other investigators and litigators.

We developed CaseGuide together to make case organization fast and easy. CaseGuide streamlines case management, creating a secure, collaborative process for organizing and analyzing case information so that investigators across agencies can focus on solving crimes and getting justice for victims and their families.

Sounds great, right? But what does that look like in practice? From a technology perspective, we designed CaseGuide to bring case file management into the 21st century:

Industry-leading security

We take security and your trust in us seriously. CaseGuide uses multi-factor authentication at login, a method to authenticate users by seeking multiple factors to prove the user’s identity. CaseGuide enables this automatically for all organizations, and can grant an authentication code to last for a period of time before a new code is required.

Cloud-based platform

CaseGuide creates a more secure way to store sensitive case information so that teams can collaborate easily. As a software as a service, or SaaS, platform, CaseGuide is cloud-based and accessed on the web. This means credentialed users can log in from anywhere with an internet connection. With CaseGuide, you can grant and restrict access as you see fit.

Multi-user system

CaseGuide makes collaboration easy. You decide what to share externally and with who. Separate organization and case permissions allow you to share an entire case file or a single document via the online platform. For example, you can share an autopsy report with a medical examiner, a document for translation with an interpreter, or the full case file with a collaborating agency.

State-of-the-art media capabilities

CaseGuide is prepared to handle any media type. It stores high-resolution photos, videos, and audio files, allowing you to analyze and annotate crime scene photos, surveillance footage, and witness interviews all in one platform. And with its high-quality media player, you can play video and audio files right in the platform.

Advanced analytics

The potential for technology is huge. We’re already proud of the CaseGuide product, but the opportunities to develop it further are endless. As we do, we’ll continue to bring the best of technology to case management, so that investigators can focus on solving crimes and bringing justice to victims’ families.