Legal Statuses

Legal action administration allows an organization to define and categorize the legal action types that can be set up on individual cases and legal statuses. The ability to configure and define legal statuses for legal actions is supported.

When a court makes a decision about what will happen to a participant, it determines a legal status. Examples of legal statuses include adjudicated, crown ward, parental rights terminated, parental custody, and temporary custody. During the course of a case or legal action, a participant's legal status may change. The changes in a participant's legal status can be accessed and tracked by a caseworker. A history of a participant's legal status is maintained to allow the caseworker to see how a participant's legal status has changed over time, e.g. a participant's legal status may have initially been determined to be 'temporary custody' but then changed to 'parental rights terminated' when there was no longer the possibility that the participant would return home. Legal statuses are not tied to legal actions but may vary depending on or be impacted by the legal action outcome.

An administrator can associate each legal status with an integrated case type, product case type, screening, and investigation and also remove the associations if required. For example, an administrator can associate a legal status of type 'temporary custody' with an integrated case of type 'ongoing case'. This allows caseworker to create this legal status against participants of any cases that are based on the ongoing case type. For example, the temporary custody legal status can be applied to children placed in temporary custody.

The administrator may also indicate whether or not only one or multiple legal statuses can be active at a time within a particular type of case.

Legal actions provide the flexibility to define multiple legal statuses for a single individual at the solution or case level. For example, an organization can indicate that for all cases, a participant can only have one legal status active at one time, while other cases may have multiple legal statuses active for a participant at one time.