Morrow County Municipal Court uses new tech to cut costs

By Tay­lor Kaser -

Mor­row County’s Munic­i­pal Court is set­ting itself apart from courts around the coun­try. By uti­liz­ing new tech­nol­ogy, the court is quickly reach­ing its goal in basi­cally func­tion­ing paperless.

Judge Lee McClel­land explained that his court is one of a hand­ful of courts oper­at­ing on Mac hard­ware pro­grams — most oper­ate on a Win­dows platform.

A long time Mac enthu­si­ast, McClel­land said Macs were first used for book­keep­ing in the office. Dur­ing the 80s, a data base was later set up to man­age and track cases as well. Instruc­tion and oper­a­tion is more eas­ily learned on Macs, he noted.

A friend, who was also a retired elec­tri­cal engi­neer, helped with improv­ing the sys­tem by upgrad­ing the Helix soft­ware to the File Maker data base pro­gram. Those advances allowed the court to begin keep­ing track of cases electronically.

“We wanted to get rid of paper and go to com­put­er­ized records, so I can call up any record from any case [on his office com­puter],” explained McClel­land, “I can actu­ally dis­pose of cases right here.”

The court han­dles approx­i­mately 10,000 cases every year.

Since those ini­tial improve­ments, the sys­tem has been con­tin­u­ally upgraded with added fea­tures. Eric Bush was later brought in as a con­sul­tant almost a year ago.

“We have the crim­i­nal side almost where we want it,” McClel­land said, ”we went live with it Novem­ber of 2011. We’ve been keep­ing all of our cases on it since that time, plus scan­ning in old files. So even­tu­ally we’ll have the last five years on, and then 10 years on. Every­thing will be computerized.”

Just recently he said that all the account­ing, reports to the Supreme Court, and the auditor’s office are on the com­puter, sav­ing the clerks time. He described it as “beta test­ing” right now. An accoun­tant who was con­sulted on the sys­tem sug­gested some improve­ments. Those revi­sions are cur­rently being made to the system.

“Pretty soon we’ll have all of our book­keep­ing, cases, trial assign­ments and motion hear­ings han­dled elec­tron­i­cally.” he said. When pos­si­ble, like with attor­neys, the court is send­ing notices by email rather than through the mail, sav­ing on paper and postage. Even­tu­ally a form will be avail­able for those who wish to be con­tacted by email.

McClel­land looks for­ward to more trial related busi­ness. Instead of phys­i­cal paper­work, the Pros­e­cu­tor and defendant’s attor­neys will be able to sub­mit infor­ma­tion elec­tron­i­cally, straight to the court. Court dock­ets and jury selec­tion is also han­dled electronically.

Though oper­at­ing on a dif­fer­ent sys­tem, he said that there are no issues with com­mu­ni­cat­ing infor­ma­tion with other offices in the courthouse.

From a con­ve­nience and effi­ciency stand­point, the changes are pos­i­tive, but they’re also ben­e­fi­cial from a finan­cial per­spec­tive as well, McClel­land explained.

He described the court as being in a “pinch” with the option to either go elec­tronic or hire new employ­ees. The court receives new man­dates from the state every year, he explained, with­out any assis­tance to off­set the cost of imple­ment­ing those new require­ments. By invest­ing in tech­nol­ogy, McClel­land explained that he can negate the higher costs asso­ci­ated with hir­ing new employees.

In the future he would also like to pur­chase hand held scan­ners for the local police to use. An offi­cer would be able to scan a license into the machine and print out the phys­i­cal ticket for the defen­dant, while elec­tron­i­cally send­ing a copy of the ticket to court simultaneously.

Under the cur­rent sys­tem, tick­ets must be writ­ten out by hand by the offi­cer then the phys­i­cal ticket is brought into the court where it then has to be copied and retyped into the system.

The new sys­tem would save costs, and cut down on the num­ber of mis­takes that are always attached to retyp­ing infor­ma­tion mul­ti­ple times, noted McClelland.

A fact that can be appre­ci­ated by every­one in the county is that the court’s mod­ern­iza­tion is being accom­plished entirely with­out tax payer money. McClel­land explained that monies for the updates come from the costs and fees issued by the court, and so is essen­tially “user funded.”

Posted by Randa Wagner on Jan 23 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.