Episode 023: The Paperless Prosecutor’s Office with Guy Sweet

We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about the many different ways that courts, government offices, insurance agencies, and even our own offices have benefited from having a paperless solution in place. But what about the legal and law enforcement sides of the equation? After all, they are a key part of the justice system with their own unique set of challenges, and many different elements come into play with any each department. And when time is of the essence, as it often is within the prosecutor’s office to ensure the public safety, it’s never been more true that some requests just can’t wait for the delays that paper creates.

Today we’re joined by Guy Sweet, assistant prosecuting attorney for Ingham County, Michigan, and he’ll be sharing his perspective on the impact of paperless solutions have made for the prosecutor’s office. Guy, thanks for joining us today.

Locating files was always a challenge. If someone called me like a defense attorney, or a witness, or a victim called me on the phone, I’d have to take a piece of note paper and write down the message. Then I would have to go in search for the file. Now you’d think the file would be in a central file room, but that was true only about half the time, because the file could be on a clerical assistant’s desk, could be in an attorney’s office, could be with an attorney over in court. So it was kind of a paper chase trying to track down the file so I could then recopy the note into the file so whoever handled it next knew what the attorney, victim, or police officer wanted to discuss.

We would receive stuff in the US mail. We would receive things over a fax machine. Occasionally our attorneys would be in court and be served with a document, like a discovery demand by a defense attorney, or a motion or something of that nature, or documents by the court. And then, again, the challenge was making sure those got into the file. So, the people who were gonna work on the case next knew what was going on in the case.

So we studied these various portals where papers come in and out and decided that we had to centralize that somehow. And the way we chose to do that was by creating a digital file, and then the documents that belonged in that file would be scanned and indexed by an employee who was specifically dedicated for that purpose. So we set that up so that documents would come to the scanner, he or she would then scan them in and index them into where they belonged.

Another issue we had was what other kind of technology do we need? And the decision was made to invest in laptop computers for all of the attorneys or any other staff people who had to leave the office to perform their jobs. That way the files would become portable.

Now, there were challenges. The one was about scanning and indexing documents, because we had to actually create an office position and hire staff to perform this scanning function. There’s also a … when you do scanning, there’s also a risk that the document would still end up in the wrong place or maybe go out into the cyberspace someplace. Our criminal cases are given a criminal tracking number. The prefix is the year in which the case was begun, and then there’s a six-digit number that follows that. Well, if the scanner transposes two numbers in that case number, it’s not going to go where it’s supposed to. So it’s one of those things the staff just has to be very careful about, be very conscious of, and very intentional about making sure you scan something into file 11122 instead of 11221, because it wouldn’t be there.

Another challenging area was coordinating with our courts. In my county, several of our court systems aren’t run by the county, they’re run by various cities or other municipalities. And we weren’t all on the same page as far as courtroom technology. One of our courthouses, it was very old. There weren’t a lot of places to even plug in a laptop computer and so we had to struggle with those agencies and their funding units to get the court rooms up to speed so that we could not only plug our computers in, but also use wifi because our systems wifi based. And that that took some time. So there was a time that we were kind of hybrid. We would have our digital file, our master file, but sometimes we would have to make a paper file to go over and perform our work in a specific court.

I remember one particular courtroom, the nearest electrical outlet was six, eight feet from where I’m supposed to sit. So, I had to go to Ace Hardware and buy an extension cord. Just didn’t think about that. But now our courtrooms are all pretty high tech with docking stations, and because more and more, not just our office but the defense bar and others, are now paperless. So that was kind of an issue.

Another challenge we continue to deal with is storage space for files that take up a lot of memory. And we’d discovered this problem with body cam footage, dash cam footage, or perhaps a suspect interview, or witness interviews that are being recorded. Because these audio files take up a lot of memory, and we found we weren’t able to actually put those into the specific case file. We had to create a separate home for those. And we’ve had to expand on that because it keeps getting filled up because of these videos can … if you have a dash cam that’s on for an hour, that takes up a lot of memory.

So it’s a uniform document organization system. So if I access one of these digital files and I want to read the police report, I just go to the file folder for police report, click on it, and I can read all the reports that are in there so it makes file organization a lot easier. I talked about the rigors of having to locate a file. I don’t need to do that anymore. All I need to do, if I know the criminal tracking number, I can search by number, or if I know the name of the defendant, I can search by name, pull up the file, and I can just read it right here from my desk. I don’t have to walk over to a file room and hunt around for a file or ask somebody if they’ve seen it lately-

And then another … maybe this is more of a challenge than anything else, is once you convert to a digital system you have to upgrade the system, which means everybody has to at some point, couple of times a year, turn in their laptops so our IT department can go into them and update any of the software or applications that are in those. And it’s just one other thing we just have to be very conscious of and intentional about, is that that once you start this system you have to upgrade it.

The other thing the digital system helps us with is redacting FOIA exempt information from the document. In the old days, I’d have to xerox the document on a copy machine. I’d have to take a pair of scissors and literally cut out any of the exempt material, and then I’d have to copy it again.

So now you’re in the child support enforcement area, so can you tell me a little bit about what that involves?

The role of the prosecutor is what we call order establishment or paternity establishment. We do the genetic testing, we determine whether or not the person is the father, we get a court order recognizing him as the father, and then we get what’s called an initial support order. That order then is transmitted to the Friend of the Court office because they’re our enforcement or collections agency. And they basically live with the case until 10 years after the child emancipates. So, as you can imagine, they accumulate a lot of files, whereas we move them through quickly. We may live with a case for two or three months, Friend of the Court has to live with us for up to 28 years.

Another issue we had with paper is if I needed to look at a file that was being worked by the Friend of the Court office, I would have to go down to their office, go into their file room, have somebody pull it for me, sit down and read it, make copies of anything I needed, bring it back up and put it in our file. So that that was a challenge. Putting notes in a file was a challenge because we would have a … on the left side, inside left side of the Manila folder, we would have a note sheet. So, again, if somebody called me and gave me some information about a child support case, I’d have to jot it down, go find the file, rewrite the note on the note sheet so the next person who handled it knew what had happened.

Organizing documents within the file is, again, there was no real set way to organize documents. So everybody kinda did their own thing.

Because of this federal tax information and confidentiality issue, we had to create kind of a hybrid system where our master file, our main file, is in fact digital. But when the attorneys have to go to court to present a support recommendation to a judge, we have to actually print documents in the digital file, put them into an old fashioned Manila folder and walk them over to court, because we can’t take a laptop over there because it might have this federal tax information.

It’s more efficient to enter notes in a digital system because if a custodial parent or noncustodial parent calls me and provides information about his or her case, I can just pull up the file and type that in to a specifically designated note screen. I don’t need to write it down on a piece of paper and go find a file and recopy it and so forth.

So and we get a lot of phone calls here from people with questions about their case, or they want to tell us they’ve moved and have a new address, or they’ve changed jobs and we need to get their income information. Our Friend of the Court office went paperless a few years after we did, and now I can not only look at my own unit’s files, but I can also look at these Friend of the Court enforcement files. So if I’m having a case with the parents who have an older child who’s already subject to enforcement, I can go look at that file and I can find all kinds of valuable information about the parent’s income, what current orders are in effect, what current child support’s being paid, etc.

It’s also like with the criminal division, it’s easier to find things in files because we’ve created special file, or folders within the digital file to create, to house any documents we send to or receive from a court. Any kind of correspondence, any financial information, any information about where somebody may or may not be living.

One difference between the way our criminal … or our child support division works in our criminal division works, in our criminal division we have designated persons, employees, staff who scan and index documents. Down in child support, we all scan and index documents because almost all of us have face to face contact with custodial or noncustodial parents. They may come in for a meeting, they might hand me a paycheck stub. Well rather than walk it down to somebody else to scan, I have a scanner at my desk and I just scan it into the file myself. And so it makes our work a little more efficient. So, we’ve kind of set that process up a little differently.

So we’re in that process now, our court entered the first phase and pretty soon they’re going to go into phase two where we’re actually going to start electronically filing our complaints, our orders, our notices, and other type of court documents.

Second thing I’ve kind of got an eye on is once our court can go digital, I’m hoping that there will be a way I can actually pull up and look at the actual court file. As I said before, I’m able to do that with a Friend of the Court enforcement file, but I can’t do that with our trial court files yet. But I think if we’re all on the same imaging system, I should be able to have the wherewithal to look at a court file and make sure that there’s nothing in there that I don’t have in mine, or if somebody went and filed a motion that didn’t serve me, I would be able to pull that up and scan it into my own file. Currently if that happens, I have to call one of the court clerks and ask them to make me a copy and either send it to me by courier or email it to me or something. But if we’re able to interface better, I can actually look at, download documents and save some time.

Thanks again for joining us today for this episode of Paperless Productivity. This podcast is sponsored by ImageSoft, the paperless process people, which you can learn more about at ImageSoftInc.com. That’s ImageSoft I-N-C dot com. Join us next time where you’ll learn how to harness the power of technology, supercharge efficiency, and accomplish your organization’s goals.