A routine systems outage is scheduled from 5 p.m. on Monday, March 30, to 7 a.m. on Tuesday, March 31, to implement several user experience enhancements to the Duty Counsel Portal.
Impacted systems:
Users of the Duty Counsel Portal are encouraged to take a few minutes to review the list below of what’s changing.
As a reminder, effective April 1, scheduled based duty counsel certificates must be billed within 30 days as opposed to previous six moth billing guideline.
What Duty Counsel Portal users can expect on March 31
User interface enhancements
Selecting a name from search results now opens the file directly, rather than displaying a preview.
When you click a name it will no longer display this preview screen but opens the file directly.
The Recent Portal Activities view now indicates whether a Service Decision Status is at:
• Offer request (waiting for LAA to send the offer),or
• Offer issued (waiting for a lawyer to accept or decline.
• Offer request (waiting for LAA to send the offer),or
• Offer issued (waiting for a lawyer to accept or decline.
More screen space provided for notes, with hover‑over pop‑ups that display the full note text.
Columns in the Certificate and Service Decision Status sections have been reorganized, and a new column has been added to show additional contact information for the assigned lawyer.
The Certificate Service Decision section has been moved higher on the page to reduce scrolling.
Dashboard lists now display all relevant files by default, eliminating the need to select View all; lists can be navigated by scrolling
New and updated fields
New options have been added to existing status dropdowns (e.g., waiting for disclosure, waiting for ECR) to more accurately reflect the current status of a client file.
A new Assigned by field has been added to the Client Interactions page and will automatically populate to support quicker follow‑up and clarification.
A new Created by field has been added to the JP Bail Outcome page and will automatically populate with the user’s name to make follow‑up easier.
The date fields use a consistent format. If you type MM/DD/YY it will auto format it to the standard format.
New Clients Preferred Lawyer read-only fields have been added to the Client Interactions page and will automatically populate up to three preferred lawyers names client provided during application. A new Preferred Counsel field will also allow the lawyer to update PC if different, which will integrate to CRM upon submitting Assessment Outcome.
