042: A Failing Storage Unit to a Flourishing eFiling System: A District Court’s Transformation Story

And so I, along with a number of folks in my operation, one of them being Tamara Williams, who is also on this podcast, a supervisor for me, were challenged by trying to manage the paper within our court. Three years ago, we were told by the, what we launched on base three years ago, TrueFiling three years ago, but we were advised by our, our County Board of Commissioners that we would have to do something with the storage facility where we keep all of our files, because they were going to rip it down. And that, in fact, did happened and we had over a hundred thousand files in there. So, we needed to figure out how to manage that. And our solution to that problem really was OnBase and TrueFiling and working with a vendor, ImageSoft, to get us off the ground. And so about three years ago, we actually launched TrueFiling and OnBase at the same time and have been working with it ever since.

If someone calls in for a question on a specific document, you don’t have to go rummaging through thousands of files looking for that piece of paper. You can simply type in the case number, even if it hasn’t been processed in our judicial information system, it’s in OnBase. We can see it and we can provide that person with the information, right then and there on the spot. We used to employ multiple volunteers, sometimes 40 hours a week, to come in just to file and sort paperwork for us to get it into the file, so that we could have everything together. And we don’t have to do any of that anymore. I mean, it’s just been amazing to not have to have all those physical files and be able to have the documents right there at your fingertips when you need it.

No longer did we have to date stamp all the documents that were coming in, that was all automated. We didn’t have to separate them and send conformed copies back to the filer, that was all automated through TrueFiling. If something needed to be signed by a judge, that didn’t need to be put in a stack of paper that they would come and grab and pull back into their office and sit at their desk and sign it. Instead, now it routes through workflow into a queue that the judge actually sits there and provides an electronic signature, through TrueSign. Once it’s back in the queue, the clerk does have to docket it in our state wide case management system, but then it’s just sent to the file. There’s no more looking for the file. There’s no more filing it and having those volunteers or any other paid staff to do that work.

When I did a calculation on this, just to get a sense of what the time savings was, I will tell you that the year that I prepared this, which I believe was 2018, there were 6,500 new civil suits, roughly, filed. In the old system it would have taken 65,850 minutes to process those new civil suits. In the new system it takes us 19,755 minutes. It’s an overall 70% time savings, and an overall cost savings about $15,000. And so that’s just the new civil suits, that doesn’t include all of the [inaudible 00:14:07] orders and whatnot. Again, even in that scenario, it’s a 70% reduction in workload as a result of the employment of TrueFiling and OnBase in our court. So we have had some definite, real and meaningful changes in our business process that have translated into an overall cost savings. And I know an overall satisfaction of court users and court employees, as a result of having this new system in our court.

I mean, not only does everything get to come over electronically, it saves them time on their end also. But that’s probably the biggest thing is that they get their conformed copies back. I mean, in the paper world, it could sometimes take four to six weeks for a paper judgment to come in to the court, get it all processed, as Therese said in her answer to the last question, get it to the judge, get it signed, get it back to the clerk and then have time to get that document conformed and back in the mail and back to the filers. So, four to six weeks versus two to three days. Our filers really, really like TrueFiling to the extent that we get questions almost on the daily about when we get to put our old civil files into OnBase that aren’t in there yet, because we started fresh when we went to the TrueFiling OnBase systems. We started just in the summer of that year, and so we’ve still got many, many, many, many, many cases that they have to paper file on and they don’t like that anymore.

One of the things that’s been great about OnBase, and I think great on both ends, pre OnBase and pre TrueFiling, pre everything. When we’re doing it the old way, a lot of the work fell on the clerk because there was a lot of preparation, a pre preparation before they went into the courtroom, forms and whatnot. Many of them, those things were never used. And so they were just tossed if they were never used, we were just anticipating what was going to happen in the court. Well, when we switched it over and went into OnBase, a lot of the tasks and responsibilities that the clerk had switched to the judge. And so in our solution, the judges are the ones that prepare the automated forms that are accessible via OnBase. So, if it’s a judgment and sentence, it’s the judge that’s completing those documents.

And so we’re only completing the documents we absolutely have to have completed. And so we’re not wasting a lot of paper and a lot of time, and the judges have a lot more control over the work that they’re generating, which is something that I know that they appreciate very much. And since Tamara mentioned COVID, I think that that’s also been an interesting experience that relates to OnBase. The court now has switched to doing a lot of virtual hearings, so a lot of our cases are being held in a virtual environment, primarily on the Zoom platform. And one of the things that’s really great is that as the judge is generating a JNS, for example, they’re able to actually share their screen, their OnBase screen, with the document that they created and filled out, with the participants of the court hearing, so they can actually see it. In the normal world, pre COVID, even with OnBase, we were not able to do that, at that moment in time. And so that’s been kind of an added benefit having OnBase on the virtual platform for court hearings.

And then I would say, I think just in general, the judges really appreciate the organization and the accessibility of OnBase, much like the staff person that Tamara referenced in the previous answer. A lot of the judges are rotating in and out, and they all now have computers at their home. And so they’re able to work from home and access their OnBase queues and do their work from a remote location, not having to be here at the court. And so that’s been a huge benefit for them, and I think something that they very much appreciate. I think, initially it was a struggle. Now, I don’t think they’d want it done any differently. And in fact, they’re always looking for new and better ways of doing things. Can we automate more things? And so now they’ve become definitely a partner and a voice for that change that we’ll continue to do in the court, moving forward.

Now we have the ability to send it through another platform, but we think that ShareBase would be a better platform and we can automate the sending of that. Right now it’s somewhat dictated on the staff to make sure that the right button is pushed and the right selection is made to get the document where it needs to go. And we think that with ShareBase we will be able to automate the sending of those documents and in fact the receiving a lot of those documents. So, then we can avoid the uploading and downloading process because we really don’t want to do that anymore. We want to be able to bring it in seamlessly into our system. So, that’s something that we’re definitely looking at implementing in the near future.