Case Management & Fee Ledger

The data is about people in the middle of a legal process, which rules out the usual conveniences: no third-party analytics on authenticated pages, no error reporting that captures request bodies, no screenshots of real records — including in this case study, which is why it names no client and links to no live system.

A date field is easy; a deadline that changes the order of the day is not. Attention is derived from the case state rather than stored as a flag, so a completed step stops shouting on its own and nothing depends on someone remembering to clear a checkbox.

The practice needed to see what was agreed and what had arrived, but a full ledger would have been the wrong product. The fee record is deliberately internal and deliberately simple: agreed amount, instalments, receipts — enough to answer the question, not enough to pretend it is bookkeeping.