✨ Why use Lawyer Assist?

If you handle dozens or hundreds of cases on the SJC portal, you know the pain: logging in every morning, clicking through each case to check for notifications, hearings, attachments, payments — losing hours every week to manual checks. And if you miss a notification or let a case sit untouched for 6 months, the consequences are real (deadlines missed, cases abandoned by law).

This app does that work for you, in the background:

• 🤖 Automatic monitoring — every monitored case is re-checked on the SJC portal every few hours. New notifications, hearings, attachments, payments, status changes — all detected without you opening anything.
• 📱 Instant alerts — WhatsApp + email the moment something changes on a case, with the case number and parties so you know immediately which one is moving.
• ⚖️ Never lose a case to abandonment — the system tracks the last activity date and warns you 30 days before a case hits the 6-month "متروكة" threshold. One click on 🔄 تجديد الاجراءات files a renewal e-request to keep it alive.
• ⚡ One-click e-request renewal — for any case at risk of becoming متروكة, just click 🔄 تجديد الاجراءات on its row. The form opens with request type 6013 (طلب تجديد دعوى) already selected, the subject already filled in from your saved template, and the captcha already being solved in the background. You enter the OTP from your phone — that's it. The renewal request is in.
• 📨 Submit any e-request in 30 seconds — 61 pre-built request types ready to use (notification re-issue, case renewal, attachment requests, expert appointments, fee transfers, evidence requests, ...). Pick the type, subject auto-fills from a template (edit + save your own version), captcha solves itself, you enter the OTP — done.
• ✍️ Upload your signature ONCE, sign every e-request automatically — go to your profile or client settings, upload a transparent PNG of your signature. From then on, every e-request you submit is automatically signed with that image embedded in the PDF — no scanning, no re-uploading per case.
• 👁 Preview before sending — every e-request can be previewed as a fully-formatted PDF (with your signature already on it) BEFORE you click Send. Catch typos in the subject, confirm the date, then submit with confidence.
• 1️⃣ One click to send, one OTP to confirm — the entire submission for the user is literally: click "Send" → wait 2 seconds → type the 6-digit OTP from your phone. Captcha, form fields, signature, PDF generation, file upload — all automated. You touch the keyboard once, for the OTP.
• 👥 Manage many clients in one place — every client's portal is unified into one dashboard. Switch between لوحة المحامي and لوحة الموكل for the same person. See parties, hearings, payments without re-logging-in to anything.
• 🗂 Sync hundreds of cases in one click — the "Synced Cases" page pulls every case visible to your SJC account (active + decided lists for lawyers — typically 400+ cases). Filter by court, type, status, abandonment risk, monitored vs. not. Pick what you want to track.
• 💰 Track payments without spreadsheets — set the total due once per case; the app sums every payment scraped from SJC and shows you the remaining balance on hover.
• 📅 Today's Hearings widget — every morning, the dashboard shows exactly which cases have a hearing today across all your clients. No more flipping calendars.
• 🔍 Audit trail — every check, every notification sent, every e-request submitted, every payment renewal — logged with timestamps.
• 🌐 Bilingual + RTL-aware — fully in Arabic or English with one click. Print any page to PDF (this guide too).

The bottom line: you stop being a portal-watcher and go back to being a lawyer. The app watches the portal so you don't have to.

🏠 1. Dashboard

Your home view. The "Today's Hearings" card lists every case you're monitoring that has a hearing scheduled today. The activity feed below shows every change detected by the auto-checker — new notifications, new attachments, new payments, status changes — across all your monitored cases.

👥 2. Clients

Add the people whose cases you handle. Each client can have their own SJC portal credentials (the SJC username + password they use on courts.gov.ps), so the system can fetch case data on their behalf.

• One client per real person/company.
• Optional: client signature image for printable case reports.

⚖️ 3. Monitored Cases

The cases you actively track. Each card shows:

• ⚖️ Lawyer portal or 👤 Client portal — which credentials we use
• 📅 Next hearing — auto-extracted from SJC, with countdown
• ⚠️ Expired / ⏳ Grace — subscription state
• 🆕 Updates — unread changes since last opened
• 📨 pending request — an electronic request is in progress

The four icon buttons on each card:

• 🔔 Notifications — court-issued notices. Hover for count.
• 📎 Attachments — files filed in the case. Click to download.
• 📅 Hearings — past + upcoming sessions. Hover the icon for next-hearing details.
• 💰 Payments — fee payments. Hover for total paid + remaining due.
• 📝 Notes — your private case notes (not synced to SJC).

📅 Hearings — what the tooltip shows

Hover the 📅 icon: Next hearing date + countdown ("in 14d") + the hearing type, plus which portal monitors this case (⚖️ Lawyer / 👤 Client / ⚠️ no creds). The "next hearing" is the earliest future hearing — past sessions are skipped.

💰 Payments — how the system calculates remaining

The 💰 icon tooltip is more than a count — it computes:

• Number of payments — rows scraped from the SJC payments table
• Total paid — sum of all amount values across rows. The parser handles Arabic-Indic digits (٠–٩), thousands separators (1,250 / ١,٢٥٠), and currency symbols — anything non-numeric is stripped before summing
• Total due — manually set per case (use the case-edit modal's "Total Due" field; it's stored on the Case row, not from SJC)
• Remaining = total_due − total_paid. Negative means overpayment.

If you haven't set a Total Due, the tooltip shows "(total due not set)" — only Number of payments + Total paid are computed. Set the Total Due once per case to unlock Remaining.

Auto-check toggle

Turn this ON for the scheduler to refresh the case every check cycle (default: 12h, configurable per-case in Edit). Turn OFF for archive-only — the scheduler skips it but you can still click "Check Now" manually.

📨 E-Request button

Submit an electronic request to the court directly from the app — no need to log into SJC manually. See section 5 below for details.

🗂 4. Synced Cases

Pulls every case visible to your SJC account so you can pick which ones to monitor.

• Click 🔄 Sync Cases to fetch from SJC (lawyer accounts get both المدورة + المفصولة lists automatically — ~426 cases for a typical lawyer)
• Filter by case type, court, status, monitored/not, and (lawyer accounts) by active/decided list
• Click + Monitor to add a case to your monitored list
• The "آخر نشاط" column shows the date of the most recent notification/attachment/hearing — used for the abandonment warning
• ⚠ Abandonment risk — appears for cases inactive 5–6 months (under Palestinian law, 6 months of inactivity = case abandoned)
• 🔄 تجديد الاجراءات — appears for cases needing a renewal e-request to keep them alive (auto-fills request type 6013)

📨 5. Electronic Requests

Submit any of 61 pre-built e-request types directly from the app. Flow:

1. Click "📨 E-Request" on a monitored case (or 🔄 تجديد الاجراءات on a synced case)
2. Pick the request type — searchable dropdown of all types
3. Subject auto-fills with a template (you can edit it freely)
4. Pick a date, attach a PDF if the request type requires one
5. Click "Send" — the system solves the captcha automatically and submits the form
6. Enter the OTP that SJC texts to your registered phone
7. Done — receipt number is shown and saved

Custom templates

If you edit the auto-filled subject, click "💾 Save as my template" — that becomes your personal default for that request type. Only you see it. Click "↺ Default" to revert.

✍️ Auto-signature — upload once, sign every e-request

The system can attach your signature image to every e-request automatically. Setup is one-time:

1. Sign a piece of white paper, scan it, save as transparent PNG (any image editor can do background removal)
2. Go to your profile (or the client's profile if it's on their behalf) → upload the signature image
3. Done — every future e-request will have it embedded automatically

You can adjust the signature scale per client, replace it any time, or delete it (e-requests still work without one — but the PDF won't be signed).

👁 Preview before sending

Before clicking "Send", click 👁 Preview in the e-request modal. The system generates the exact PDF that SJC will receive — with your formatted subject, the date, the case context, and your signature already in place. Catch typos, verify the case number, confirm the date. Then send with confidence.

1️⃣ Your only manual step: type the OTP

From the user's perspective, the entire submission is:

1. Click 📨 Send
2. ~2 seconds while the system solves the captcha + uploads the signed PDF
3. Type the 6-digit OTP that SJC just texted to your phone
4. Click ✅ Confirm

Captcha, form payload, file upload protocol, signature embedding, PDF generation — none of it touches your hands. One click + 6 digits = filed request + receipt number.

⚡ One-click renewal (تجديد دعوى)

The most powerful shortcut in the app. Any case showing the 🔄 تجديد الاجراءات button (i.e. inactive 5+ months and not already paid/decided) can be renewed with virtually zero typing:

1. Click 🔄 تجديد الاجراءات on the case row
2. The e-request modal opens with everything pre-filled: request type = 6013 (طلب تجديد دعوى), subject = your saved template (with the case number auto-substituted), today's date, captcha already loading in the background
3. Click "Send" — captcha solves itself, OTP gets sent to your phone
4. Enter the OTP — done. Renewal filed, the 6-month abandonment clock is reset.

Whole flow: 2 clicks + 6 OTP digits. Every dormant case can be saved in under a minute.

📅 6. Today's Hearings

The system runs a 3:00 AM job every day that fetches the next hearing date for every monitored case. The dashboard widget and the dedicated "Today's Hearings" page show what's scheduled for today + the next few days.

🔔 7. Notifications

You get alerts when a monitored case changes:

• WhatsApp — message includes the case number and parties (e.g. "Plaintiff X vs. Defendant Y") so you immediately know which case is moving — even for lawyer-portal cases
• Email — same content with full HTML formatting
• 📁 Decided cases — when a case moves from المدورة to المفصولة on the SJC portal, it's auto-removed from monitoring and you receive a summary of what was unmonitored
• Toggle WhatsApp/Email per user in your profile settings

⚙️ 8. Settings

• Language — Arabic (RTL) ⇄ English (LTR), saved per user on the server
• Font size — slider 12px–22px, saved per device
• Profile — display name, phone, email, alert preferences
• SJC credentials — under the SJC tab, paste your SJC login (encrypted at rest)
• Subscription — your current plan + remaining days; renew via the receipt-number flow

👨‍💼 9. Admin (admins only)

• Users — list/edit/disable, change tier, +days renewal with receipt logging (audit trail in SubscriptionRenewal table)
• Courts — manage which courts the system supports + their case-type lists
• All Cases — every case across every user, searchable
• Plans — pricing tiers (free / paid / trial settings stored in plans.json)
• Welcome Page — bilingual modal shown to new users on first login
• ⚡ Portal Performance — hourly probe latency report + worker-pool tuning for the SJC portal
• WhatsApp Logs — every sent message audit-logged with body, status, error (90-day retention)
• Email Logs — same 90-day retention

🔄 10. Subscription & trial

• Trial — 14 days from signup (configurable in plans.json)
• Plan expired — auto-check stops immediately. Manual "Check Now" stays available for a 3-day grace window, then locks too.
• Renewal — admin enters days + receipt number → days added, audit row created, confirmation email + WhatsApp sent automatically
• Renewal reminders — at 10:00 AM daily, the system messages users with ≤14 days remaining

⏰ 11. Daily schedule (Palestine time)

• Every 6 hours — auto-sync of synced cases for users with credentials
• 03:00 AM — fetch upcoming hearings (next 30 days) for every monitored case → drives "Today's Hearings" widget
• 03:30 AM — daily e-request status refresh for every client → flips 📨 pending-request badge
• 04:00 AM — synced-case activity scan (for the "متروكة قريباً" abandonment warning)
• 04:30 AM — prune old WhatsApp + email logs (keeps last 90 days)
• 10:00 AM — subscription expiry reminders

⚖️ 12. Abandonment law (متروكة)

Under Palestinian civil procedure, a case with no court activity for 6 months is deemed متروكة (abandoned) and the court can dismiss it. To prevent that, the system:

• Tracks the latest activity date per case (max of last notification, last attachment, last past hearing — registration date as fallback)
• Shows ⚠ متروكة قريباً (abandonment risk) at 5 months of inactivity — gives you 30 days to act
• Surfaces a 🔄 تجديد الاجراءات button that opens an e-request pre-filled with type 6013 (طلب تجديد دعوى — case renewal request)
• Suppresses the warning when status is مسددة (paid) or مفصولة (decided) — those don't need renewal
• Suppresses the warning when a future hearing is scheduled — court is actively handling the case

🤖 13. Captcha auto-solve

The SJC e-request form requires a captcha. The system:

1. Downloads the captcha image silently when you open the modal
2. Runs OCR with retry — up to 5 attempts
3. Submits the solved value with the form
4. If all OCR attempts fail, shows the captcha image with a manual input field as fallback

You almost never see the captcha — it stays hidden unless OCR can't crack it. All confirmed images are added to the training set to improve accuracy over time.