Closed-System Judicial Data Integration

The problem

Turkish lawyers spend enormous time manually managing case data — hearing schedules, case status, document retrieval — in a closed state system that doesn’t expose a modern API. Building a legal product that can’t surface this data is building a disconnected tool. Building one that can turns the product from a research helper into a daily workflow.

The approach

I designed a bidirectional integration that pulled case management data, hearing schedules, and document metadata from a closed judicial system and synchronized it into the Lex Asistan platform through a dedicated desktop application. The desktop app handled authentication locally with user-delegated credentials, managed rate limits and concurrency constraints, and pushed normalized data to the cloud backend in near-real-time.

This turned case tracking, hearing reminders, and automatic document surfacing from manual workflows into automatic features — the kind of capability that anchors a product’s daily-use case.

Engineering challenges

Handling authentication for a system with strict session management, navigating aggressive rate limiting without dropping data, maintaining reliability across version changes on the source side, and designing the sync protocol to handle intermittent connectivity gracefully.

Stack

Desktop application, Python backend, FastAPI sync endpoints, PostgreSQL for normalized case data, resilient queueing.