Advanced Telegram Bot for Legal Case Management and Professional Services

In the dynamic world of legal technology, Telegram bots have become powerful tools for automating complex tasks, enhancing user interaction, and delivering professional services. This article explores an advanced Telegram bot designed specifically for legal case tracking, subscription management, and access to legal resources. Built with Node.js and the Telegraf framework, this bot integrates with a MySQL database, the NowPayments API, and web scraping tools to provide a robust platform for legal professionals, clients, and administrators. Below, we dive into its features, technical implementation, and practical applications, including a detailed code example.

Overview of the Telegram Bot

This Telegram bot is a comprehensive solution that streamlines legal case management by automating case tracking, offering premium subscriptions, and providing access to legal resources such as FAQs, document templates, and a lawyer directory. It scrapes case updates from judicial websites like sudrf.ru, stores data securely in a MySQL database, and processes payments via the NowPayments API. The bot is designed for scalability, reliability, and user-friendliness, with distinct interfaces for regular users and administrators. Its modular architecture ensures it can handle high user volumes while maintaining performance and data integrity.

Core Features of the Telegram Bot

The bot is packed with functionalities tailored to the needs of legal professionals, clients, and administrators. Below is an in-depth look at its key features:

1. Real-Time Case Tracking and Notifications

• Case URL Tracking: Users can submit URLs from judicial websites like sudrf.ru to monitor legal cases. The bot extracts and tracks details such as case numbers, parties, hearing dates, and judicial outcomes.
• Scheduled Updates: The bot performs hourly checks on tracked URLs, using a rate limiter to prevent server overload and comply with website policies.
• Comprehensive Parsing: Extracts detailed case information, including unique identifiers (UIDs), metadata (e.g., judge, filing date), and event timelines, presenting them in a clear, structured format.
• Instant Alerts: Sends Telegram notifications with inline buttons when updates are detected, allowing users to view case details or visit the original URL directly.

2. Subscription-Based Premium Features

• Freemium Model: Offers a free tier with basic case tracking and a premium tier with advanced features like access to lawyer contacts, enhanced search capabilities, and document templates.
• Payment Integration: Uses the NowPayments API to create secure, USD-based monthly subscriptions with customizable success and cancel URLs for a seamless payment experience.
• Subscription Management: Automatically validates user subscriptions to unlock premium features, with administrators able to review payment histories and activate test subscriptions.
• User-Friendly Upgrades: Provides clear instructions and inline buttons for users to upgrade to premium, enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

3. Legal Resource Hub

• FAQ System: Maintains a dynamic FAQ database, editable by administrators, to answer common questions about case tracking, legal processes, and bot usage.
• Document Templates: Premium users can access and download legal document templates stored in the MySQL database, simplifying the creation of contracts, motions, and other legal paperwork.
• Lawyer Directory: Offers a searchable database of lawyers, with premium users able to view detailed profiles, including specialization, costs, and contact details (phone, email, social media).
• Advanced Search: Allows users to filter lawyers by criteria such as name, specialization, or location, making it easy to find the right legal professional.

4. Powerful Administrative Controls

• Content Management: Administrators can add, edit, or delete FAQs, templates, and lawyer profiles via an intuitive inline keyboard interface within Telegram.
• Specialization Filters: Enables admins to categorize and filter lawyers by expertise, streamlining the management of niche legal services.
• Subscription Analytics: Provides insights into user subscriptions, including active statuses, payment histories, and renewal dates, to optimize monetization strategies.
• User Activity Tracking: Admins can view metrics like the number of tracked cases, ad views, and user interactions to assess bot performance and user engagement.

5. Data Privacy and Security

• Consent Mechanism: Requires users to provide explicit consent for data processing via an inline keyboard prompt at first interaction, ensuring compliance with data protection laws.
• Secure Database: Uses a MySQL connection pool (limited to 10 connections) to store user data, case snapshots, and subscription details securely, with JSON fields for flexibility.
• Message History Control: Limits message history to 10 messages per user, automatically clearing older messages to minimize clutter and enhance privacy.

6. Technical Robustness and Scalability

• Rate Limiting: Implements a 2-second delay between HTTP requests using the Bottleneck library to ensure ethical scraping and prevent IP bans.
• Error Handling: Features a comprehensive logging system with info, warning, and error levels, timestamped in ISO format for easy debugging.
• Retry Mechanism: Uses the async-retry library to attempt database connections up to three times, handling transient failures gracefully.
• Encoding Compatibility: Processes Windows-1251 encoded HTML from sudrf.ru using iconv-lite, ensuring accurate parsing of Cyrillic content.

Key Benefits of the Telegram Bot

Technical Implementation Details

The bot’s architecture is built for reliability, scalability, and maintainability, leveraging modern tools and best practices:

• Node.js and Telegraf: Uses an event-driven framework for efficient Telegram API interactions, with middleware for session management and user state tracking.
• MySQL Integration: Employs a connection pool with JSON fields to store user profiles, case snapshots, FAQs, templates, and lawyer data, optimizing query performance.
• Web Scraping: Utilizes Cheerio for HTML parsing and iconv-lite for encoding conversion, ensuring accurate extraction of case details from judicial websites.
• Rate Limiting: The Bottleneck library enforces a 2-second delay between requests, maintaining ethical scraping practices and server stability.
• Logging Framework: A custom logger captures runtime events with detailed timestamps, aiding in diagnostics and performance monitoring.
• Environment Validation: Checks for critical environment variables (e.g., TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN, MYSQL_HOST) at startup to prevent configuration errors.

Code Example: Manual Case Update Check

Below is a detailed code snippet of the manualCheckUpdates function, which enables users to manually trigger case update checks, showcasing the bot’s technical sophistication:

async function manualCheckUpdates(ctx) {
  const userId = ctx.from.id;
  const userData = await getUserData(userId, ctx);
  if (!userData.tracked_urls?.length) {
    const msg = await ctx.reply('У вас нет отслеживаемых дел.', {
      reply_markup: { inline_keyboard: [[{ text: '🔙 Назад', callback_data: 'back_to_menu' }]] }
    });
    await addToMessageHistory(userData, msg.message_id);
    return;
  }

  const processingMsg = await ctx.reply('🔍 Проверяем обновления...');
  await addToMessageHistory(userData, processingMsg.message_id);
  let updatesFound = 0;

  for (const url of userData.tracked_urls) {
    try {
      const response = await limiter.schedule(() => axios.get(url, {
        responseType: 'arraybuffer',
        timeout: 10000,
        headers: { 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36' }
      }));
      if (response.status !== 200) {
        throw new Error(`HTTP status ${response.status}`);
      }
      const html = iconv.decode(Buffer.from(response.data), 'windows-1251');
      const caseDetails = await parseCaseDetails(html, url);
      const contentHash = crypto.createHash('md5').update(JSON.stringify(caseDetails)).digest('hex');
      const snapshot = userData.page_snapshots[url] || {};

      if (!caseDetails.caseUid) {
        logger.warn(`No case UID for URL ${url} during manual check, skipping`);
        continue;
      }

      if (snapshot.contentHash !== contentHash) {
        updatesFound++;
        userData.page_snapshots[url] = {
          case_number: caseDetails.caseNumber || 'не указано',
          case_uid: caseDetails.caseUid,
          timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
          contentHash,
          caseDetails
        };
        let updateMessage = `🔔 Обновление по делу ${caseDetails.caseUid}\n`;
        updateMessage += `🔢 Номер дела: ${caseDetails.caseNumber || 'не указано'}\n`;
        updateMessage += `📅 Дата рассмотрения: ${caseDetails.metadata.hearingDate || 'не указано'}\n`;
        updateMessage += `📋 Категория: ${caseDetails.metadata.caseCategory || 'не указано'}\n`;
        updateMessage += `⚖️ Судья: ${caseDetails.metadata.judge || 'не указано'}\n`;
        updateMessage += `👤 Истец: ${caseDetails.parties?.plaintiff || 'не указано'}\n`;
        updateMessage += `👤 Ответчик: ${caseDetails.parties?.defendant || 'не указано'}\n`;
        if (caseDetails.events?.length > 0) {
          const lastEvent = caseDetails.events[caseDetails.events.length - 1];
          updateMessage += `🆕 Последнее событие: ${lastEvent.name || 'не указано'}\n⏰ Дата: ${lastEvent.date || 'не указано'}\n`;
        }
        await ctx.reply(updateMessage, {
          disable_web_page_preview: true,
          reply_markup: { inline_keyboard: [[{ text: '🔗 Открыть дело', url }, { text: '🔙 Назад', callback_data: 'back_to_menu' }]] }
        });
        logger.info(`Manual update sent for user ${userId}, case ${caseDetails.caseUid}, URL ${url}`);
      }
    } catch (error) {
      logger.error(`Manual check failed for ${url}: ${error.message}`);
    }
  }

  userData.last_checked_time = new Date();
  await saveUserData(userId, userData);

  await ctx.telegram.editMessageText(
    ctx.chat.id,
    processingMsg.message_id,
    null,
    updatesFound > 0 ? `✅ Найдено ${updatesFound} обновлений.` : 'ℹ️ Изменений не обнаружено.',
    { reply_markup: { inline_keyboard: [[{ text: '🔙 Назад', callback_data: 'back_to_menu' }]] }
  );
  ctx.session = {};
}

This function illustrates the bot’s ability to handle user-initiated case checks. It uses the limiter to schedule HTTP requests, decodes HTML content with iconv-lite, and compares content hashes to detect changes. The function updates user data, sends formatted notifications with inline buttons, and ensures error resilience, showcasing the bot’s robust engineering.

Target Audience and Use Cases

The bot serves a wide range of users, each benefiting from its tailored functionalities:

• Legal Professionals: Lawyers and paralegals can monitor multiple cases simultaneously, receiving instant updates and accessing legal resources to streamline their workflows.
• Clients: Individuals involved in legal proceedings can track case progress, access FAQs, and find affordable lawyers without needing technical expertise.
• Law Firms: Firms can deploy the bot to manage client cases, offer premium services, and automate administrative tasks, improving client satisfaction.
• Developers: Tech enthusiasts can study the bot’s codebase to learn advanced Telegram bot development, including web scraping, payment integration, and database management.
• Administrators: Bot operators can efficiently manage content, subscriptions, and user data through the admin panel, ensuring the bot remains up-to-date and effective.

Future Enhancements

To keep the bot at the forefront of legal tech, potential enhancements include:

• AI-Driven Analysis: Integrate machine learning to analyze case trends and predict outcomes based on historical data.
• Multilingual Support: Add support for additional languages to serve a global audience, expanding beyond Russian-speaking users.
• Dynamic Document Generation: Enable users to create custom legal documents by filling out interactive forms within Telegram.
• Voice Interaction: Implement voice command support using Telegram’s voice message API for hands-free operation.
• Analytics Dashboard: Develop a web-based interface for administrators to view real-time metrics on bot usage, subscriptions, and case tracking activity.

Conclusion

This Telegram bot is a groundbreaking tool in legal technology, seamlessly integrating automated case tracking, subscription management, and professional resource access into a single platform. Powered by Node.js, Telegraf, and MySQL, it offers unmatched reliability, scalability, and user engagement. Whether you’re a lawyer seeking to streamline case management, a client needing accessible legal updates, or a developer exploring Telegram bot development, this bot delivers exceptional value. To learn more about building similar solutions, explore the Telegraf documentation, NowPayments API, or MySQL resources. Start leveraging this innovative bot to transform legal service delivery today!

joker

Professional data parsing via ZennoPoster, Python, creating browser and keyboard automation scripts. SEO-promotion and website creation: from a business card site to a full-fledged portal.