Tech Unicorn fast tracks better collaboration in virtual courtrooms with Azure and Microsoft Teams

The challenge

Tech Unicorn, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, provides future-focused marketing, technology, and digital transformation services to clients across multiple sectors and markets. The company is headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), with a client base spanning the UAE, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States.

Tech Unicorn’s virtual hearings solution, called Unicorn Digital Courtroom, dates to mid- 2020, during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s when the company’s local Microsoft account team introduced Tech Unicorn to the Ministry of Justice for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who needed a way to automatically record hearings conducted on Microsoft Teams.

Within about 10 days, Tech Unicorn had delivered a working solution and began to engage with the Ministry on what it ultimately needed: a way to extend its Teams environment into a comprehensive virtual hearings solution—one tailored to the needs of the court, the people who run it, and the more than 25 million people who rely on the Kingdom’s courts system for access to justice. Soon thereafter, the solution was supporting some 3,600 judges conducting 7,500-10,000 hearings per day.

“As we engaged with the Ministry, we quickly assembled a long list of requirements,” recalls Ani Dave, Founder and CEO of Tech Unicorn. “However, many of those requirements shared a common theme: the Ministry needed additional features and controls to enhance the user experience, including a way to extend that experience to the millions of people who connect with the court every day.”

As Tech Unicorn worked with the Ministry to define the ideal solution, it also started to engage with court systems in other countries. “One common problem, we found, was that the people on a video call couldn’t easily tell who’s who—for example, the judge was getting lost within all the other hearing participants,” explains Dave. “We realized we had to deliver a high level of visual clarity, which drove development of early UI features such as a virtual bench for the judge.”

However, while Tech Unicorn could implement such features in Teams, as a Teams meeting extension, it still faced one major challenge: how to extend the experience being delivered to Teams users within the Ministry of Justice to the country’s population at large.

The solution

The answer to that challenge—and enabler for many yet-to-be-envisioned features of Unicorn Digital Courtroom—came when Tech Unicorn joined the Technology Adoption Program for Azure Communication Services, a set of APIs for delivering rich communication experiences at scale. Powered by the same platform used by Microsoft Teams, Azure Communication Services enables the delivery of video, voice, chat, text messaging, and telephony to any user, across all devices, on any platform.

“We began to explore how Azure Communication Services could help us meet the needs of the courts as soon as we had access,” recalls Dave. “The big breakthrough came with the interoperability into Teams, which enabled us to extend what we were building on Teams to the public at-large through a custom Unicorn Digital Courtroom web application.”   

By March 2021, Tech Unicorn had a robust working application, which the Ministry of Justice—now fully committed to deploying Unicorn Digital Courtroom—began to pilot-test in some of its smaller courts. By March 2022, one year later, the Ministry had used Unicorn Digital Courtroom to clear a backlog of some 2 million cases.

Soon after engaging with the Ministry, Tech Unicorn began showing its solution to additional court systems around the world, incorporating many of the additional features they suggested—for example, enabling sidebar conversations in a digital hallway, like how attorneys and their clients might consult in the hallways outside of a physical courtroom.

One such court system was the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles. The Court had been working on LACourtConnect (LACC), a self-hosted remote appearance solution, since 2018, but wasn’t fully satisfied with it. “The backend meeting platform underneath LACC was not built to scale, did not have all the features of a modern meeting platform, and lacked the ability to compensate for packet loss, jitter and other issues associated with inadequate bandwidth at the end points,” says Snorri Ogata, Chief Information Officer for the Court. “This caused us to pivot and replace the underlying platform with Microsoft Teams in May 2021.”

While the change to Teams was well received due to improved remote hearing quality, the Court still needed features like:

• Fine-grained meeting controls (such as the ability to mute/unmute participants without their permission – a key for a court hearing)
• Security (to allow only authorized participants to join the hearing vs. anyone with the Teams meeting link)
• The ability to easily move people into the virtual hearing space from a pre-hearing lobby

As soon as LACC on Teams was up and running, the Court began discussions with ATI/Steamwrite, a local solution provider, on how to move the platform to Azure Communication Services. “We wanted all the benefits of a commercial grade meeting platform, but we also wanted it to be specifically tailored to the way that the Court does business,” explains Ogata. “As we began working on a plan to migrate LACC to Azure Communication Services, we were introduced to Tech Unicorn and their Unicorn Digital Courtroom product by Microsoft's Worldwide Public Safety and Justice team.”

Continues Ogata, “We immediately saw the value that Tech Unicorn brought to the table. They were an early adopter of Azure Communication Services and had a demonstrated understanding of using meeting technologies in a court setting in the Middle East.”

Over the following six months, Tech Unicorn worked with the Court to further define the features it needed. Dave and her team traveled to Los Angeles, where they sat alongside judges and court clerks to ensure that the solution’s design and features would align with how those people worked.

“The court already had Teams,” recalls Dave. “Sitting side-by-side with the people who were using it gave us lots of ideas how we could use Azure Communication Services to tailor that Teams environment to how they worked. For example, we noticed that one court admin had five windows open on her screen and was constantly switching between those apps while tracking other things on paper—all while participating in a Teams meeting. That gave us the idea for a control panel tailored to the role of court admin, which was immediately embraced. That led to control panels for other roles, with all of them tied into the court management system.”

Azure Communication Services enabled other innovative features, as well, helping Tech Unicorn take a highly customizable, user-centric approach in designing a meeting and video calling experience for courts in a remote as well as hybrid setting. “In the past, the court published multiple links for various meetings for each courtroom, which made the experience cumbersome for the Court Administrator,” explains Dave. “In scenarios with day-long Teams meetings, they had to track activity manually, such as people leaving and entering as one hearing ended and another one started. Today, such activity is tracked and orchestrated by Unicorn Digital Courtroom via a unified interface that enables all hearings to be easily managed using the application. Features such as side bar conversations, breakout rooms, and live streaming for courtroom monitoring are all powered by Azure Communication Services.”

By February 2022, Tech Unicorn was winding-up development and implementing the final changes requested by the court, including PSTN integration to enable people without data access to call into hearings on their phones. The Court solution went live with Unicorn Digital Courtroom in May 2022.

Implementation and architecture

Unicorn Digital Courtroom can be used together with Teams or can be used stand alone; in which case all user experiences are delivered via Azure Communication Services. For external users (i.e., those who don’t work for the court and aren’t on Teams), the user experience is web-based. It’s hosted within Azure App Service and is accessed via the court’s website. The LACourtConnect website—part of the Court’s broader Access LACourt Your Way initiative—is a good example, providing information about the Court’s new remote hearings option, the ability to schedule a virtual hearing online, and access to a comprehensive user guide.

In building the web-based interface, Tech Unicorn relied heavily on the Azure Communication Services core SDK and UI Library. The library provides a set of open-source UI component building blocks along with a set of composites, which are turnkey solutions that employ those UI components to implement common communication scenarios.

“We built our own wrapper on top of the Azure Communication Services UI Library, enabling us to streamline our development process and standardize the UI across the application,” says Dave. “The Azure Communication Services UI library was a great tool for us to get started, and the product group played a very important role in providing resources that helped us fast track our development process.”

Teams users (i.e., those who work for the Court) access Unicorn Digital Courtroom through a Teams meeting extension that Tech Unicorn developed. The app, in turn, uses Azure Communication Services to combine functionality delivered by the two different services through a single, unified interface that’s optimized for court clerks and other user roles.

“The interoperability between Teams and Azure Communication Services enables us to retain the internal collaboration that’s being done in Teams and extending that experience to external, non-Teams users,” explains Dave. “The result is a virtual hearings experience that’s accessible to all; people don’t need to download Teams and can join a virtual hearing using a tablet, smartphone, desktop or laptop PC, or a voice call via PSTN.”

According to Dave, developers found using the Azure Communication Services SDKs and REST APIs to be straightforward. They’re conceptually organized into discrete areas based on function, with most areas having SDKs programmed against published REST APIs that you can use directly over the Internet.

“The hardest part was keeping up with the constant innovation from the Azure Communication Services product team as the service itself evolved into what it is today,” says Dave. “We attended a lot of product workshops to keep up with all the new features, which also gave us the chance to provide feedback. The product team has been very open to our suggestions; it’s rewarding to see the things we’ve requested show up on their product roadmap.”

Continues Dave, “We also owe a great deal of thanks to the many other teams at Microsoft who’ve helped us succeed—especially the Microsoft Worldwide Public Safety and Justice Team, who collaborated with us along with the Azure Communication Services product team throughout our journey.”

In addition to Microsoft Teams and Azure Communication Services, Unicorn Digital Courtroom relies on several other Azure services, including Azure App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Event Grid, Azure SQL Database, Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Container Registry, Azure Bot Services, Azure Key Vault, Azure Front Door, and Azure Application Gateway.

Rich, easily accessible virtual hearings

Through its use of Teams and Azure Communication Services, Tech Unicorn is delivering a full-featured virtual hearings solution that’s optimized for all parties involved, including judges, court clerks, defendants, claimants, and legal counsel. Hearings can be recorded and archived, transcribed, and translated in real-time, and streamed live to a larger audience. Evidence can be submitted prior to a hearing in the form of documents, images, and videos, and historical data from previous hearings can be easily accessed.

Unicorn Digital Courtroom also supports automated reminders and notifications, digital signing of court documents, AI-powered identity verification, and protection of witness identities. APIs are provided for integrating with existing applications, and the entire user experience can be personalized via custom layouts and workflows to meet each court’s unique requirements.

May 13, 2022, marked the formal rollout of Unicorn Digital Courtroom for the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles—the largest court system in the United States. The rollout took about 3 weeks, with 600 judges in 400 courtrooms now using Unicorn Digital Unicorn to handle an estimated 37,000 hearings per month.

Improved service delivery, increased efficiency, and more

The greatest benefit the Court expects to realize is improved service delivery. “The court hearing, while similar to a company meeting in many ways, is different,” says Ogata. “To close that gap, courts and other organizations with unique remote service delivery needs require finer controls than what are available in the commercial Teams product—and Unicorn Digital Courtroom delivers just that.”

Continues Ogata, “The social re-engineering that occurred because of the pandemic shifted peoples’ fears and attitudes toward remote technology. While remote (telephonic) hearings have been around for many years, their adoption was always hindered by old assumptions of ‘I need to be in the Court where I can see the Judge’s face.’ In reality, with a virtual hearing, everyone sees the judge’s face better than ever—and for those parties who elect to appear via video, the judge sees them better as well.”

Virtual hearings are also helping the Court improve efficiency. “A lot of court proceedings help the parties continue to move the case along,” explains Sherri R. Carter, Court Executive Officer. “Almost all of those proceedings are ideal for remote hearings. It’s too early to know how effective remote hearings will be for jury trials but, contrary to what television dramas would have you believe, the percentage of cases that actually make it to trial are few and far between. In some litigation areas, the switch to remote hearings has actually made the Court more efficient as measured by backlog and case inventories.”

Carter also notes that the cost to operate a remote hearings ecosystem is significantly less than what it was just a few years ago. “The reality is that post-pandemic, we will likely live in a hybrid hearing universe where some people attend in person and some attend remotely,” says Carter. “This will put new challenges on the Court to ensure that everyone has an equal experience regardless of location. It will require changes to microphones, speakers, and cameras in the courtroom, so our journey is not yet complete.”

Last but not least, Ogata notes how Unicorn Digital Courtroom allowed the Court to build on the Microsoft Azure infrastructure it already had in place. “The Azure eco-system—and Azure Communication Services in particular—is the future, allowing the Court to dictate how technology can optimally support it and not the other way around,” says Ogata. “Teams is a foundational element of the Court’s internal collaboration strategy. With Azure Communication Services, we are now able to extend its services delivery, and it’s working very well for us in that role.” B”

Adds Dave, “An additional benefit of running on Azure services is that the court can ramp-up usage as quickly as it wants—without having to worry about the scalability of the underlying platform.”

A world of opportunities

While the Court proceeds with its rollout of Unicorn Digital Courtroom, Tech Unicorn plans to work on further enhancements that can drive additional impact for customers. “We’re constantly evolving our solution with every new customer,” Dave says. “It’s a new product in an open space, so there’s lots of opportunity. And the use cases for what we’ve built aren’t limited to courts—Unicorn Digital Courtroom could very easily be adapted to other ‘justice’ venues, such as prisons and corrections, witness protection, juvenile courts, self-help services, probation services, and public defender services.”

In the beginning, Tech Unicorn had about 15 engineers working on Unicorn Digital Courtroom. Today, the company has about 70 engineers building solutions powered by Azure Communication Services. “Azure Communication Services has become a larger and larger part of our solution design as we venture into other markets,” says Dave. “We see opportunities everywhere, including in the healthcare and financial services sectors. Of course, there are also many other public-sector use cases, such as the remote telemedicine solution we’re now building for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health. There’s so much value we can deliver with Azure Communication Services—we’re really excited about all the opportunities.”