Ashok's Case Summary

Photograph the page you scribbled during the client meeting, and get back a clean summary you can check, fix and keep in the case file.

Who this is for

Ashok Deshmukh has practised in Nashik for nineteen years. His office above a stationery shop holds him, two juniors and a clerk named Sarika. He meets four or five clients a day and writes as they talk, in a long notebook, in a hand only he can read. The moment this lands is nine at night, when he sits with the notebook and tries to remember whether the Patil land matter hearing was the eleventh or the seventeenth.

How the job is done today

The notebook is the whole system. Ashok writes during the meeting, half in Marathi, half in English, with arrows and margin notes. On Thursday evenings he calls Sarika in and reads pages out loud while she types them into a Word file on the office desktop. She stops him often because a name is unclear. Some weeks the reading does not happen, and then a junior rings him from outside court asking what the client said about the sale deed. Three years of notebooks sit in a steel cupboard. Nobody opens them.

The screens, in order

1. Shoot the page — Lets Ashok hold the phone over his open notebook right after the client leaves and take one photo of each page he filled.
2. Which matter — Asks him to attach those pages to an existing case or start a new one, so the photos never sit loose.
3. Draft and original — Shows the written-out summary with his photograph beside it, so he can read both and correct anything the app got wrong before it counts as final.
4. The case file — Holds every approved summary for one matter in date order, so a junior can read the whole story of the case in five minutes.
5. Send it — Puts the approved summary into WhatsApp or as a plain file for the junior, the clerk, or the client's son who keeps asking for updates.

What it keeps track of

• Matter — client name, what the dispute is about, which court, next hearing date, which junior is handling it
• Note pages — the photographs, the day they were taken, which matter they belong to, who they were taken during a meeting with
• Summary — the draft the app wrote, the version Ashok approved, when he approved it, what he changed
• People — client name, phone number, who else in the family calls about this matter

The one decision that matters

Either the app reads the handwriting and shows Ashok only the clean typed summary, or it keeps his photograph on the same screen, line beside line, and makes him look at both. The clean version looks better and is faster to approve. Keep the photograph. Handwriting is read wrongly in exactly the places that hurt most: a date, a survey number, a client's surname, an amount in lakhs. Ashok is the only person alive who can check those, and he will only check them if the original is in front of him. Make approving take one look longer than it needs to.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out searching across old matters, and leave out any way for a client to open the app. The steel cupboard of old notebooks can stay a cupboard. The whole value is the hour after a meeting, while Ashok still remembers what the arrow in the margin meant. If the app only ever handles cases opened from the day it is installed, it is still worth having by the end of the month.

How you would know it worked

The Thursday evening sitting with Sarika stops happening, and nobody rings Ashok from outside the court building to ask what the client said.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I am an advocate in Nashik and I write case notes by hand while clients talk. I want a phone app where I photograph my notebook pages as soon as the meeting ends, tell it which client and matter the pages belong to, and it writes out a proper summary of what was discussed and what has to be done next. It must show my photo next to the summary so I can check the dates and names myself before I accept it, because my handwriting gets read wrong. Once I accept it, keep it in that client's file with all the earlier summaries in order, and let me send it on WhatsApp to my junior. My notes mix Marathi and English, so it must handle both.