Choctaw Nation protects and empowers its people with automated, cloud-first workflows

The Choctaw Nation, the third-largest Indian Nation in the U.S., enlisted Box to modernize critical justice and public safety workflows in order to better serve the tribal members and non-tribal citizens on its land.

The more than 225,000 tribal members within the Choctaw Nation have an oral tradition dating back over 13,000 years, and its historic reservation boundaries cover 10,923 square miles in the southeast corner of Oklahoma. The Nation’s vision, “Living out the Chahta Spirit of faith, family, and culture,” is evident as the Choctaw Nation continues to focus on providing opportunities for growth and prosperity.

As just one part of this mission, the Choctaw Nation has long provided legal representation for its members, but a recent US Supreme Court ruling regarding tribal jurisdiction led to a significant increase in the day-to-day work of the Choctaw Nation’s justice and public safety teams. Case volume rose from roughly 200 cases a year to more than 700 cases a week. The governing body had to build new departments almost overnight and find faster ways of managing workflows critical to everyday work.

This story is a window into how a sovereign tribal nation within the US uses Box to move fast and protect both sensitive data and its members, ultimately in order to better govern its people and protect its sovereignty.

Key takeaways:

• Choctaw Nation saves more than 360 hours a year and speeds up payments to jurors with juror check-in and invoice automation
• The tribe has cut turnaround time from a 30-day minimum down to one pay period with a Box-powered employee loan program 
• The access visibility and security features Box provides help protect the nation’s sovereignty and reputation, which matter just as much as time savings

Managing sensitive information across the tribal nation

The Choctaw Nation offers a comprehensive range of services to the hundreds of thousands of tribal members it serves. Nearly 500 separate services include a housing authority that provides home repairs and storm shelters, an education foundation that offers scholarships and career development, and a health services authority that fills millions of prescriptions at no cost to patients.

In facilitating all of these efforts, the tribe collects sensitive information — everything from W-9 collection  to case records involving children and domestic violence survivors. Todd Hughes, Senior Director for IT Justice and Travel Services at Choctaw Nation, sums up the problem that led to switching to Box: “We had to find a way to collect sensitive data a lot more securely than by email.” 

Hughes also describes a past data breach that accrued astounding legal, forensic, and PR costs.  In fact, the sum was more than the price of the tribe’s entire first Box implementation, as he notes: “That one event cost the nation, between our legal team and everything else, a lot of money.”

Visibility into access and security is paramount, and moving to Intelligent Content Management from Box provided the tribe with the single, secure location for files they needed so they could then take advantage of what AI can enable. Hughes says, “With Box, we know who has access to files, and our businesses love that. They love being in control, instead of having to fill out a ticket to add or remove people.”

From that secure, AI-enabled content foundation, opportunities to innovate with AI appeared.

Ballooning cases, manual processes, scattered information

Choctaw Nation’s justice and public safety teams ran on paper for a long time. Santana Milligan, Business Systems Analyst Manager for Choctaw Nation, describes three separate systems jurors had to move through just to check in:

1. They filled out handwritten forms
2. Registered in a separate check-in system
3. And stood in line before they could even get into the courtroom

“That’s three different lines with over 100 jurors, and it all starts at 8 am, and you can’t start the trial until all of it is processed,” Milligan shares. Meanwhile, in the back office, staff manually processed juror mileage and daily payments, which typically meant deciphering handwritten information, validating addresses, and calculating travel reimbursement by hand.

In 2026, Choctaw Nation applied Box to replace the paper check-in and juror payment process with online and on-site tablet check-in. The new process goes something like this.

Form submission and information intake

Jurors are provided a link to a secure, online, fillable form, hosted by Box, which can be completed beforehand or upon arrival for orientation. They’re instructed to enter their basic information, including their home address.

Automated document generation and signature

Using Box Extract and Box Doc Gen, the system automatically generates two necessary documents: the juror oath and the W-9 form (required for processing payment for jury duty and mileage). Jurors electronically sign these generated documents with Box Sign, and all the documents stay in the same location throughout the entire process.

Automated mileage calculation

The team built custom code to run behind scenes, which takes the juror's submitted home address and automatically calculates the round-trip distance, eliminating the previous requirement of manually recording odometer readings. 

Automated invoice generation and processing

The Box workflow automatically generates the payment invoices for the finance/procurement department, drastically reducing the manual processing time of payments from two weeks post-trial down to an automated immediate process.

This Box-powered juror process saves one to two hours daily during check-in, eliminates roughly 40 hours of invoice processing, and saves associates more than 60 hours a week.

A unified, secured public defender repository

Meanwhile, in Choctaw Nation’s public defender office, associates historically stored case documents in unstructured local storage. Important evidence, like photos and surveillance video, ended up scattered across locations. Hughes explains: “We discovered that our evidence could be stored in five different places. That’s just completely unacceptable.”

At one point, paperwork accumulated in a single office had become so voluminous that the sagging floor was at risk of collapse. To remedy this, the team migrated case documents out of physical local storage and into the cloud via Box. They then built no-code apps and dashboards using Box Forms, Box AI, and Box Automate, using extracted metadata to capture information about the cases so information is more easily searchable. 

Now, Choctaw Nation public defenders can use Box AI to sift through discovery bundles and transcripts rapidly. And Miller mentions the benefits of being able to build a Box Agent for different tasks that can leverage any model: “I can pick the model that I want to use to analyze the data that we're looking at, which allows the team to initially review cases faster and more precisely.”

With Box serving as an AI-driven case management platform, Choctaw Nation’s public defender’s office has successfully improved response times, case prep efficiency, and visibility into caseloads. (And the floor is no longer threatening to collapse.)

Saving hundreds of hours a year on loan applications

One of nearly 500 critical services provided by the tribal government, the tribe’s employee loan program faced similar bottlenecks. Choctaw Nation processes between 250 and 500 loan applications a year, moving through a paper process that historically took at least 30 days to turn around.

They’ve now digitized the entire paper loan process using Box Apps, Box Automate, and Box Sign, establishing self-service applications and real-time tracking connecting credit, HR, and payroll. With this system in place, turnaround time has dropped from a 30-day minimum down to just one pay period, and the tribe estimates saving between 125 and 500 labor hours annually in this area alone.

Box Sign and custom Box Apps are quickly becoming standard tools across the tribal nation.Other teams at Choctaw Nation have used Box to implement digital workflows for things like timecards, agreements, and intake forms. In 2026, the finance treasury team migrated roughly 15 years of investment documents, audits, and legal records into Box, providing external auditors and vendors secure access outside the tribe's network while leveraging AI-powered search. 

The tribe now runs 23 custom applications built on Box, has uploaded more than 70,000 files, and has so far processed more than 10,000 documents through the Box Sign queue. 

Helping support sovereignty through confident use of user-friendly technology

Beyond high-level governance and risk mitigation, reliable technology directly impacts the human reality of daily tribal services. For Milligan, that mission crystallized after shadowing an intake worker in the Choctaw Nation Health Services Authority through a series of intense crisis calls.

“I sit directly with the business and see the heavy, challenging situations our frontline staff navigate every day,” she says. “My ultimate goal is to ensure technology is never a hindrance when their job is already difficult enough. I want our teams to be able to do their work without added stress, and that’s why we trust Box. It gives them a secure, dependable system so they can stay focused on supporting our people.”

Milligan, a tribal member herself, is candid about how Intelligent Content Management serves the operations, ultimately helping preserve the tribe's reputation and sovereignty as much as it saves time and money. Sitting within the state of Oklahoma geographically, but operating as an entirely independent entity, is a tricky and sometimes high-stakes endeavor. She says, “The last thing the Choctaw Nation wants is negative press. That could impact our cultural image and our tribal sovereignty.”

Because Choctaw Nation can collaborate on content, bring AI into workflows, and secure all of its content on Box, teams can feel confident about their ability to work with the State and other outside entities, with their complex rules and regulations around data sharing. This is important, because the Choctaw Nation has critical agreements with the State of Oklahoma including hunting and fishing compacts and commerce compacts. “The more we can demonstrate that  we know what we’re doing in the eyes of the State” says Miller, “the better overall that is for our tribe.”