Integrate Alerts with Tags and Notes

[s-taube]

Headline

FLP enhances Alerts feature by integrating tags and notes capabilities.

What is the Feature?

This feature would integrate alerts, tags, and notes.

For one docket, a user can create an alert, add a tag, and add notes. However, alerts, tags, and notes all exist in separate views. Users would like to view their alerts, along with all associated tags and notes at the same time.

What Problem Might it Solve?

User Story: As a user with hundreds of alerts, I would like to view my alerts by groups/topics, so I can more easily organize and find the alert I’m searching for.

User feedback (from ux research in Feb 2025): A lawyer with hundreds of docket alerts has created tags and notes on those dockets to help organize his alerts into categories. However, the tags and notes he’s created are not visible on the alerts page. He suggested he would like to view and sort by both tags and notes on the alerts page.

Technical Requirements

• How hard is it to make, subjectively? [Easy | Medium | Hard]
• Best guess, how long would it take to make, roughly? [X days/weeks/months/years]
• What would it require that we do technically?

Existing Systems or Alternatives?

Where to find Alerts, Notes, and Tags today:

• On the Alerts page, there are two types of alerts: search alerts and docket alerts
• Notes are on another tab
• And tags can be found by selecting "tags" in the "Profile" dropdown (top right)

Any Additional Information?

Alerts page today:

Requirements:

• Users should be able to add and create tags and notes when they save a new alert.

TBD:

• Do users need to sort by both "tags" and "notes," or is "tags" adequate?
• Should "tags" be available as a "tab" along with alerts and notes?
• Should users be able to edit tags and notes on the alerts page?
• Should additional metadata be visible on the alerts page (date note/tag created, etc?)
• If tags and notes pages remain (since not all tags or notes will be associated with an alert), what alert info will appear on those pages, if any?

[mlissner]

I think this can go a lot further. I see it as a merger of all the stuff people have about particular cases: Tags, docket alerts, notes, and whatever comes next (prayers?)

I'm imagining a pretty big change:

• Instead of having separate pages for each of these things, we have two pages: My Cases and Search Alerts.
• Any time we show a case, we check for the user's context:
  • If we send an alert, we include their tags and notes.
  • If we show search results, we include their tags and an icon that there's a note.
  • And so forth

Complexity

1. We can tag, pray for, and have alerts for a bunch of different object types, so this page would need to handle that.

2. People will want to filter this page by tag, words in their notes, object type, etc.

3. What other actions should people be able to take on this page? Ideas:

   • Add/delete/change tags?
   • Disable/enable alerts?
   • Add/remove prayers?
   • Add/delete/change notes?

Benefits

• We can show all context for a case in a single place.
• Simpler profile with all things in one powerful page, including a simplified Profile drop down in upper right corner.
• Personalized context all over the site, emails, etc.
• We can actually put some work into the page, since it will enhance not only tags, notes, alerts, or prayers, but all four at once. Currently, these pages are a bit of a backwater because none of the individual features feels important enough to build a really good page.

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What's next? I don't know when we'll be able to get to this, but I think it's an important change that isn't that hard technically, but is hard to design/UX.

Maybe the next step is to begin figuring out a list of places we'd want to enhance, figure out what the new page would look like, and which features on the individual pages would be easy/hard to merge. Maybe we can do a mock up after that?

[mlissner]

Stripe has a really nice version of a filterable list:

I like the buttons across the top as an interesting UI pattern, and the filters are very powerful. For example: