Government & criminal justice
UK court system
Delivered features on the national platform that runs criminal cases through the courts — statutory hearings reporting and cross-government integration, on a system where a defect is a justice outcome rather than a bad user session.
- Role
- Senior engineer on the delivery team
- Stage
- Government / national infrastructure
- Sector
- Government & criminal justice
Outcomes
- Criminal cases carried
- 1.3M+Criminal cases carried
- Concurrent users
- 40kConcurrent users
- Programme scale
- £1BnProgramme scale
- Event-sourced case domain
- CQRSEvent-sourced case domain
Context
The Common Platform is the digital case system for criminal justice in England and Wales — a programme valued at around £1Bn, carrying more than 1.3 million criminal cases and serving tens of thousands of concurrent users across courts, prosecution, defence, and police. It replaces paper and legacy systems in live courtrooms, so delivery happens against a service that cannot pause.
The problem
Court data is statutory. Reporting has to match what legislation requires rather than what is convenient to query; records must be accurate and auditable because they carry legal weight; and integrations reach into other government systems whose availability and data quality are outside your control. All of it has to hold at national scale.
- 01
Built statutory court hearings reporting
Reporting over hearing data shaped by legislation rather than by what the data model made easy — the output has to be defensible as a legal record, not merely plausible.
- 02
Integrated with DVLA
Cross-government integration bringing driver and vehicle records into the case flow, with the failure handling that depends on a system you neither own nor control.
- 03
Worked in a CQRS, event-sourced domain
Command/query separation over an event history — the shape that suits a domain where how a case reached its current state matters as much as the state itself, and where the audit trail is a legal requirement.
- 04
Delivered against a live national service
Shipping into courtrooms already depending on the platform, at a concurrency level that makes performance and reliability regressions immediately visible.
Stack
- Java 17
- Spring Boot
- Angular
- PostgreSQL
- Azure
- CQRS