A legal hearing is a legal proceeding held before a judge or other legal authority.
Legal actions support the creation and tracking of legal hearings. The user selects the category of legal action, i.e., "Hearing", and the type of legal action, for example, "Pre-Detention" or "Detention".
Additional information recorded during the hearing creation includes the docket number, court location, judge name, participant, start date, and outcome.
Once a legal hearing has been created, case workers and court officers can track and manage the progress of the hearing. This includes scheduling the hearing and gathering information. On scheduling a hearing, notices are generated and sent to each participant added to the legal hearing. A number of other activities can be performed during the course of a scheduled hearing. These include the ability to add representatives and witnesses to the hearing, manage rescheduled, canceled or adjourned hearings, as well as finalize the legal hearing based on the decision reached at the scheduled hearing. Once a decision has been captured for the hearing, an overall decision is reached and the hearing legal action may be closed. The overall decision may result in the creation of a legal order or a request to create another legal petition and file in the court.
Note that the process for managing legal hearings and hearings held for appeals is the same. For more information on managing hearings and decisions for appeals, see Hearing Appeal Type Lifecycle.