Step 1 · Judicial chambers

Chambers request form

A page of its own, outside RiteTrack. Chambers staff open a link and fill it in — no application to learn, no licence to assign, nothing to install. It posts straight into the scheduling queue.

Session note · 16:52Today the 17 secretaries email Patty. If she takes a week off she returns to roughly 600 messages. This form is the replacement for that inbox — and keeping it outside RiteTrack means chambers never has to be onboarded to get it.

🔒 forms.alleghenycourts.us/family/listing-request

AC

Request a listing · Family Division

For judicial chambers. Submissions reach the scheduling office immediately.

No sign-in. The link is emailed once to each chambers and works from any county machine. Submissions are stamped with the chambers that sent them, and Patty sees them the moment they arrive.

New listing request

FD-REQ · draft

Judge

Matter type

Length

Venue

Half of day

FD number

Not before

Mirrors the "schedule it after ___" line chambers writes today.

Plaintiff counsel

Defendant counsel

Session note · 36:42Counsel is a free-text field in FCSS today — it repeats whatever was typed last time, and there is no way back to a bar number. These fields read the participant table the custody module already populates.

Scheduling order

Note to scheduling

What scheduling receives

Submitting writes one record. It lands in the queue, it counts toward the trend report, and the order travels with it. No re-keying anywhere.

This judge's rules

How it reaches the queue

The form is a static page on the county web server. It posts one JSON document to RiteTrack over the documented interface, and the reply carries the request number back to the person who submitted it. Nothing else is exposed.

Hosting	County web server. No RiteTrack licence consumed by chambers.
Identity	Per-chambers link. Every submission carries the sending chambers and a timestamp.
Transport	Single authenticated POST to the listings endpoint.
Failure	If RiteTrack is unreachable the form holds the request and retries, then emails scheduling as a fallback.

Step 2 · Scheduling desk

Scheduling queue

One list, sorted by age. It replaces the read/unread trick in Outlook and the Microsoft List that has to be typed up separately.

Session note · 20:43Three systems doing one job — email in, a hand-kept list for tracking, FCSS for the actual scheduling. This is all three.

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Waiting to be listed

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Oldest in queue (days)

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Listed this month

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Waiting on chambers

Find a case

FD number, party, counsel, or judge

Session note · 4:30"Trying to find something" was on her list of dislikes. This searches listings and open requests together, which is the thing FCSS and the tracking list can't do between them.

Open requests

Session note · 25:14She reads her backlog by judge, using unread mail as the counter. These are the same counts, kept for her.

Age	Judge	Matter	FD number	Length	Venue	Not before	Order	Status

Step 3 · Listing

Judge week

The judge's rules are drawn on the calendar, so an available slot is actually available. Hatched means a standing rule blocks it. Shaded means the judge would rather you didn't.

Session note · 26:49"Someone who doesn't know the system looks at this and asks why we can't put it at 11:30." Now the calendar answers that question itself.

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Courtroom Teams Chambers Standing rule Judge prefers not Open

Standing rules in force

🔒 Visible to scheduling roles only

Step 4 · The question everyone calls about

Courtroom availability

Every courtroom, the whole day, one screen. An all-day matter reads as all day. Two judges can share a room at different hours — no chambers workaround required.

Session note · 10:08 & 49:43Two problems solved by the same picture: finding an open room took a dozen clicks through individual judges, and an all-day PFA listing displayed as morning-only — so a room looked free at 1:30 while the judge was on the bench in it.

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In a courtroom Remote / chambers Protection from abuse Open

Open right now

When someone calls asking for a room this afternoon, this is the answer without opening a single judge's calendar.

Room	Floor	Open windows	Total open

Step 5 · The request Patty gets weekly

Month at a glance

One judge, one month, everything on it — trials, conciliations, chambers days, time off. Print it or send it without editing a 300-page PDF.

Session note · 52:14The current workaround is printing every judge for the whole month, then deleting the other sixteen judges' pages one range at a time. Laura's version is a pen.

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Step 6 · Public facing

Wayfinding board

The hallway screens read straight off the listings. Nothing is typed twice, hearing officers included.

Session note · 11:44Thirty minutes every morning, if uninterrupted, retyping into the television screen what was already entered in FCSS — plus the hearing officers, who sit in the same room every single day. This screen is generated, not entered.

AC

Family Division

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3

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Courtrooms on this floor Updated live from the court calendar

Standing assignments

Hearing officers keep the same room. Entered once, here, and the board carries them forward every day.

Hearing officer	Room	Days	Hours

Step 7 · Public website

Public motions calendar

The month builds itself from the listings. Publish pushes it to the county site through the feed — or hand it over as a file if the site team would rather paste it.

Session note · 55:35Every month, all thirty days of the motions calendar are typed into the website tool by hand, with the FCSS calendar open on the other half of the screen.

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Date	Judge	Room	Time

Publish

Destination

Handoff format

Site ownership sits with the communications team; IT holds the connection. Once it's pointed at the feed, nobody in the scheduling office touches it again.

Step 8 · Court IT

Exports & API

Pick the columns, pick the order, save it as a named layout. What comes out is already shaped the way the receiving system wants it, so nobody reformats anything downstream.

Session note · 1:04:44The ask wasn't "can you export to Excel" — it was "can the export already be in our columns," so that Patty isn't reformatting a file after the system produces it.

Column layout

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Preview

Integration surface

REST	Two-way, documented. Read and write on every scheduling object.
Webhook	Fires on list, continue, cancel, room change. JSON payload, your endpoint.
Feed	Read-only URL per courtroom, per floor, per judge. What the screens consume.
iCal	Subscription per judge for chambers calendars.

No private back door — everything the screens use is on the documented interface, which is what makes the four-network situation workable.

Configuration · Restricted

Judicial preferences

The scheduling matrix, held in the system instead of a spreadsheet. Rules the calendar can enforce are on the left; the ones that only a person can weigh are notes.

Session note · 33:20Judges will object if their preferences are visible to each other. Read access here is limited to the scheduling role — and it's the answer to what happens when the desk is covered by someone else.

🔒 Scheduling administrators only · every change is logged

Rules the calendar enforces

Day begins

Day ends

Midday

Notes for the scheduling desk

Blocked days

Chambers can hold a day here directly. It shows as unavailable on the calendar without saying why.

Court-wide holidays

Session note · 2:03Holidays are added to every calendar by hand today. One import covers the court year for all seventeen judges.

Court administration

Request trends

What the hand-kept list was really for. Same numbers, no typing — because every request already arrived as a record.

Session note · 18:33Two years of tracking has been worth it: seeing school choice build through June, emergency filings before the holidays, and which judges have room to help another department.

Requests by matter type · last 90 days

Queue depth by judge

Seasonality

School choice against emergency custody, by month of filing. The shape chambers already knows, now on the record.