🎯 Project Objective

To build a PowerApp integrated with a complex SQL Server backend, enabling legal staff to manage and record court proceedings, client and attorney data, and scheduling with automation, data integrity, and usability in mind.

📁 Core Modules & Tables Involved

The system is based on over 10 normalized SQL tables, each representing legal data entities.

✅ Core Tables:

• Clients: Names, titles, date of birth, gender
• Attorneys: Names, genders, identifiers
• Matters: Client-specific legal cases with metadata like open/close dates
• Case Captions: Standard legal formatting for each case (multi-line support)
• Judges, Courthouses, Courtrooms: Each with identifiers and address details

✅ Master Junction Tables:

• matter_case_test and client_case_caption_test link clients and matters to their captions
• originating_attorney_test maintains source attorneys per matter

✅ Primary Operational Table:

• half_sheet_test: This is the main court date recording table, capturing:
• Judge, courthouse, courtroom
• Description of proceedings
• Next court date, time, and mode (Zoom/in-person)
• Transcript requests
• Final judgments
• Billable time and mileage for attorneys

🧩 App Functional Requirements

🔹 Phase 1 – Design & Analysis
Analyze data relationships, finalize schema
Align PowerApps data connectors to SQL tables (especially half_sheet_test)
Design lookup and dropdown mechanisms for linked tables


🔹 Phase 2 – PowerApps Development
Main Features:
- Create/update/view/delete court hearing entries
- Auto-filled dropdowns for selecting attorneys, judges, clients, matters
- Input forms for courtroom proceedings


UI Experience:
- Form-first layout for quick data entry
- Conditional fields and validations


SQL Integration:
- Direct connection to Azure SQL
- Real-time data syncing

🔹 Phase 3 – Testing & Final Delivery
- CRUD testing on all operational forms
- Verify relational integrity (IDs and foreign keys)
- PDF generation and email triggers (Zapier or Power Automate)
- Final client testing (UAT) and feedback integration

🛡️ Special Considerations

Security: Enforce SQL authentication and PowerApps access restrictions
Performance: Minimize API calls, use optimized SQL queries
Scalability: Database and app structure ready for expansion