Rebuilding a Federal Veterans Appeals Platform in Two Weeks with AI
Background
During the first Trump administration, Coa’s CEO led a 32-person team that built a case management system for the VA Board of Veterans’ Appeals — one of the first uses of GitHub and modern development practices inside VA. The system processed appeals decisions for hundreds of thousands of veterans. When the codebase was released as open source, he forked it and built a commercial version for a veterans law firm.
That commercial platform has been in production since 2018. It handles document ingestion, annotation, and collaboration across the firm’s entire caseload — 50+ attorneys working against 10TB of case files. The platform includes a cloud-hosted PDF viewer, case-level tagging and commenting, document comparison across repeat appeals, and full audit trails. Coa has maintained and evolved it continuously for eight years.
“[Adjudicate] is critical to what we do. We could not do our work without it.”
— Top Veterans Law Firm Attorney
The Rewrite
Two weeks ago, the platform was rebuilt from the ground up using AI-assisted development. The original system was years of accumulated work by a large team. The rewrite took two weeks.
The results were immediate and measurable. The rebuilt platform is now faster than the original system running inside VA.
| Metric | Page | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LCP p50 | Case Select | 2.4s | 463ms | 5.2x faster |
| LCP p50 | Claims Folder | 4.8s | 1.5s | 3.2x faster |
| LCP p50 | Document Viewer | 2.2s | 708ms | 3.1x faster |
| FCP p50 | Case Select | 2.9s | 416ms | 7.0x faster |
| FCP p50 | Claims Folder | 1.6s | 548ms | 2.9x faster |
| FCP p50 | Document Viewer | 1.9s | 492ms | 3.9x faster |
| Duration p50 | Case Select | 9.3s | 5.8s | 1.6x faster |
| Duration p50 | Claims Folder | 6.6s | 4.8s | 1.4x faster |
| Duration p50 | Document Viewer | 8.4s | 6.4s | 1.3x faster |
Reduced bug surface. Cleaner architecture that makes future feature work faster — new capabilities like case comparison workflows and granular user-level annotation controls are already shipping on top of the rebuilt foundation.
What This Demonstrates
“We are seeing [the case file] the way VA sees it…Precision on knowing what a document is and when it was received is very important.”
— Top Veterans Law Firm Attorney
This is the same problem domain VA works in every day — veterans appeals, case management, document-heavy workflows, sensitive PII. The platform serves a law firm, but the patterns are identical to what VA needs: ingesting thousands of mixed-format records per case, surfacing the right documents at the right time, and giving users tools to annotate and collaborate without losing context.
The rewrite wasn’t a prototype or a demo. It’s a production system that 50+ people use daily, running against 10TB of real data. And it was done in two weeks by the same person who built the original system inside government — now running a small company with the tools to move faster.
AI doesn’t replace domain knowledge. It accelerates the people who already have it. A small team with the right context and modern tooling can move at a pace that wasn’t possible three years ago. VA is capable of the same speed — with the right team and the right structure.
See our full past performance across VA and IRS, or learn how to partner with us.