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The Coroner's Office team at the Council provides a highly effective service, meeting all the inquest and evidence requirements for the county.

Typically, the team might handle about 10 inquests a week, each requiring supporting inquest and disclosure bundles. Over the course of a year though, far more complex cases also arise. These require detailed inquest files along with numerous evidence bundles for a wide range of third parties. These can range from the families of the deceased and legal representatives to any council or health related departments that are involved.

With these more complex cases, there is often a sudden influx of information from a wide variety of sources and a requirement to produce numerous bundles for the eleven members of the inquest jury. All of this information has to be incorporated and indexed effectively prior to an inquest.

The Coroner's Office became aware of the system through their interaction with the County Council's Legal Services team, where it had proved to be highly effective for creating secure legal document bundles.

Whilst the Coroner's Court only currently accepts paper inquest files and disclosure bundles, The Coroner's team could see enormous potential of preparing these electronically. Upon review the team realised that Zylpha was able to fully automate the bundling processes and therein deliver a number of major benefits.

As Michelle Cook of the Coroner's team notes; "With Zylpha it is simply a lot quicker to produce inquest and disclosure bundles - whether it's in terms of scanning-in paper documents or incorporating the increasing number of electronic documents that arrive here. With Zylpha in place, it really is so easy to incorporate documents, to order them and to page number them. Previously, all this was done by hand including the page numbering and you can imagine with the bigger cases what a time consuming task that could be.

"There is considerable difference between numbering a document of 5 pages to one of 300 pages and when you really have quite a small team of highly qualified staff it seems odd that one should have to number things by hand. With Zylpha though, the whole process of creating, ordering and numbering is now automatic. The time savings therefore are considerable.

"It helps with the variation in case size too. Typically, the cases that come in might just require one bundle however - once every 4 or 5 weeks we might have a more complex inquest with numerous parties involved. Then occasionally, we can have a highly complex case that lasts for some months. Such cases could require 30 or 40 bundles.

"With Zylpha, we now have the ability to scale our operations more easily as it gives us the flexibility to to meet this variation in the demand on our time."
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