WILMA - Web-Intelligent Legal Mechanical Assistant

Problem

JIMS is the Harris County Online Public Records web site. It is convenient for looking up filed cases, but it was taking 2 hours each day for the research that was needed. Teaching somebody to do the clicks proved that it should not be given to a human if one wants to be nice to sentient beings.

Another problem was that while the site does lend itself to research, it lacks some options, such as selecting groups of case types.

Solution

We wrote an application that did the same work as a human with a web browser. The application logged in with the given user name and password, and then maintained the login state.

To write this application, we studied the internal composition of the web site responses and gave it the same inputs as those that it expected from the browser. The application has a simple screen and is easy to operate. A cookie is used to keep it logged in.

Now that our application was talking to the JIMS site, we could ask it for all kinds of options, such as selecting specific case types, automatically following the lawyer links, extracting the address, deduping by lawyer name and so on. Here is the application happily providing the desired output, correctly formatted for further processing.

One example of further processing could be to put the data into a spreadsheet and use it with a word processor (we use OpenOffice Writer) to create letters with Mail Merge.

The software is powerful and extensible. It can be configured to run on other legal sites and to perform legal research tasks other than the one described.