Although both Arkansas’ supreme court and court of appeals have recently begun broadcasting—and archiving—live oral arguments on their Website, it is the courts’ use of enterprise content management (ECM) technology that has caught the Supreme Court’s eye.

“We’d had a document imaging system in place for several years, but it hadn’t been used much,” says Frederick. “Only a few techs even knew how to access it, and the search and retrieval capability for records wasn’t particularly useful. We had to ask ourselves, ‘Why scan anything if you can’t use the system?’”

He continues, “Our principal selection criteria for an ECM solution included the ability to manage content, automate processes, enable easy access to records and raise visibility for the legal community and the public.”

He notes that, ultimately, it was the unlimited servers included with Laserfiche Rio that won over the courts’ IT Department. “Both courts issue opinions of high interest that are heavily accessed, so we wanted to make sure we had failovers and test servers in place to accommodate that.”

Laserfiche Enables Electronic Opinions

In 2009, Arkansas became the first state to establish electronic reporting as the official medium for appellate court opinions. Substantial cost savings resulting from the transition provided the opportunity to implement Laserfiche.

“Before that, the appellate court opinions had always been officially reported in bound volumes,” says Frederick. “However, the volumes were produced and distributed approximately four times a year, which meant there was significant lag time between issuance of an opinion and its appearance in its official format.”

With declining subscription rates, higher production costs and advancing technology, the court determined that its current method of publication was no longer acceptable. “Although court systems in general have been slow to enter the digital age, we have to remember that we work for the public, and they’re used to finding information quickly on the Internet,” explains Frederick.

“One of the driving forces that led to the implementation of Laserfiche was to provide the official version of the opinions to everyone free of cost. The substantial savings realized by terminating the bound volume method was also a considerable advantage,” he says.

Using Laserfiche WebLink, a Web portal that provides instant, read-only access to documents over the Internet, the Arkansas Supreme Court and Arkansas Court of Appeals publish their latest opinions in PDF format on their Website.

“Most court records and paper copies of opinions are retained indefinitely,” notes Frederick. “In addition, we are required by statute to keep three copies of each bound volume; the final published volume count was 375 when we made the transition. From that standpoint, the storage of electronic records is far more efficient.”

In terms of search and retrieval, “metadata is a gift,” Frederick says. The Reporter of Decisions established the courts’ file structure, templates and fields, which allow anyone to access the opinions using one or more of the following criteria:

• Date.
• Court.
• Order number.
• Justice/Judge.
• Session.
• Session term.

Current Integrations, Future Plans

After enabling live video streaming by implementing a Granicus software solution, the court integrated it with Laserfiche to enable the public and legal community to access archived video footage along with a copy of the opinion tied to the case in question. “We’ve made great efforts to become more transparent,” says Frederick. “By integrating Granicus with Laserfiche, we’ve created a comprehensive digital public record that’s accessible to anyone over the Web.”

The court is currently working on integrating Laserfiche with its court management system (CMS) so that court personnel can access documents stored in Laserfiche when they’re viewing a particular case in the CMS.

Although the courts haven’t yet taken full advantage of Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool included with Laserfiche Rio, they may use Workflow to route drafts of their opinions to:

• The deciding panel (court of appeals, typically three judges) for review and annotations.
• The Reporter of Decisions for editing, publication and retention.

“Flow is a big buzzword right now, so knowing that we can use Laserfiche to automate more of our processes presents tremendous possibilities,” says Frederick.

Change Management Methodology for Curing “Parchment Disorder”

“One thing I’ve noticed after working in IT across a variety of industries is that the public sector is a little more cautious when it comes to adopting new technology,” says Frederick. “Some people still get comfort in being able to touch a piece of paper, so educating and training everyone on the value of Laserfiche has been interesting.”

In terms of change management, Frederick’s philosophy is that history always denotes the future. “As we were moving to electronic publication, we focused on the input from the Reporter of Decisions and the parameters set by the supreme court. Full integration would have been more easily put in place had we also gotten input from the court about the opinion writing process upfront.”

As Frederick and his team prepare to use Laserfiche to enable attorneys to e-file briefs and other documents that make up the appellate court record, they are training the judges, judicial clerks and administrative assistants first. “The better we understand what each court needs, the more successful the transition will be,” he says.

Frederick explains that e-filing will eliminate the need for lawyers to bring 16 copies of their briefs to court. More importantly, it will allow both courts to quickly find specific pieces of information contained within those briefs, thanks to chapter and marker breaks within electronic briefs, as well as Laserfiche’s sophisticated search capabilities.

“Digitizing will lower our costs and increase our clearance rates,” says Frederick. “Training people ahead of time is a key factor for recognizing the value that Laserfiche has to offer.”

Of his probationers, Eyrick says, “They’re just people who make some bad decisions. I try to focus on their issues and their individual dynamics, while at the same time testing them and making sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

In recognition of his commitment and personal dedication to the job, Eyrick received the 2009 “Order of Augustus,” an annual statewide probation officer award named for John Augustus, the father of probation in America.

But Eyrick’s responsibility extends beyond offering assistance to individual offenders: He’s also tasked with developing and coordinating the direction of the probation department as a whole.

For Eyrick, technology plays an important role in shaping departmental strategy. Under his direction, the department recently rolled out a video conferencing system, which has improved security by keeping inmates in jail during their arraignments. The department has also benefitted from the chief probation officer’s decision to implement Laserfiche content management more than seven years ago.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche,” Eyrick says, “we were storing piles of files that had accumulated over the course of more than twenty years. Organizing everything was a problem, as was finding enough storage room. Laserfiche changed all of that.”

Specific benefits the probation department has realized since implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Without leaving their desks, employees are now able to instantly locate probationary records within the superbly-organized Laserfiche content repository. Staff members are more productive because they no longer have to waste time searching for client files in cluttered filing rooms.
• Easy integration. Laserfiche provider BOLT Document Management created a useful integration with the probation department’s case management system that allows probation officers instant access to clients’ files while viewing case information in the database.
• Storage savings. Scanning old records into Laserfiche allowed the department to destroy thousands of hardcopy documents and reclaim a large storage room that had been in utter disarray. The Court Clerk, who shares the space, benefits from how neat and organized the room is today.

Eyrick’s success with Laserfiche soon attracted attention outside of his department, and it wasn’t long before Darlene Hale, IT director for the entire county, came calling.

The Tipping Point: From One Department to Many

Charged with delivering the most effective and affordable technology to all LaPorte County offices including the auditor, treasurer, probationer, surveyor, juvenile detention and more, Hale had noticed a few problems with the way content management had been rolled out county-wide. Chief among them was that, in the years before she’d taken the helm, individual departments such as Eyrick’s had been allowed to choose and deploy their own preferred IT systems. As a result, interoperability was lacking, sharing information was difficult and costs were high.

It was time to standardize.

In the course of Hale’s research, she determined that if one of the content management systems already in use could be expanded, the cost of conversion wouldn’t be quite so high. Two systems rose to the top: Laserfiche and Docuware. Ultimately, after talking to Eyrick and his department, comparing features and functionality and considering ROI, Laserfiche won out.

According to Hale, “The biggest thing that sets Laserfiche apart from other content management solutions is the sheer ease of use. The layout is simple and intuitive, so it’s easy for users to pick up, but just as important for IT professionals like me is that it’s also easy to administer. Setting up templates and user licenses, integrating it with other products and external applications: everything is just so easy.”

BOLT helped LaPorte County migrate the content stored in Docuware into Laserfiche by completing the following five steps:

• Examining the document and information structure of the old Docuware repositories.
• Obtaining samples of documents and data from every unique document set.
• Using the samples to determine the logic and structure incorporated in the repositories.
• Creating a unique conversion program for each document set.
• Importing and testing samples from each set in Laserfiche.

Once the testing was successfully completed, the conversion process began—one department at a time.

Each phase of the migration project was carefully defined and scheduled, since departments needed continuous access to stored content even while the process was underway. Employees could look up existing information in Docuware, but to prevent “orphaned” records, staff was not allowed to make any additions or changes. After the process was complete, the converted information was mounted as new volumes to the county’s Laserfiche server. BOLT then installed and configured the Laserfiche client software on department computers and trained each department’s personnel.

Users Love Laserfiche

Although LaPorte County now has centralized control over all of its content (ensuring that information from all departments can easily be shared), Laserfiche grants each department the flexibility to adapt the system to the way they work and manage their files. “Our users love Laserfiche,” Hale explains. “It just has so many more uses and capabilities than what they were using before.”

The county, too, has reaped the benefits of standardizing on Laserfiche. Overhead costs for content management have diminished, and information management throughout county offices has dramatically improved. In addition, all of the advantages that Steve Eyrick’s probation department realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche—increased staff productivity, storage savings and easy integration with mission-critical applications—have now materialized for all of the departments under Hale’s purview.

“Better system, more functionality, lower overhead costs, excellent ROI,” Hale concludes thoughtfully. “What’s not to love?”

Of his probationers, Eyrick says, “They’re just people who make some bad decisions. I try to focus on their issues and their individual dynamics, while at the same time testing them and making sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

In recognition of his commitment and personal dedication to the job, Eyrick received the 2009 “Order of Augustus,” an annual statewide probation officer award named for John Augustus, the father of probation in America.

But Eyrick’s responsibility extends beyond offering assistance to individual offenders: He’s also tasked with developing and coordinating the direction of the probation department as a whole.

For Eyrick, technology plays an important role in shaping departmental strategy. Under his direction, the department recently rolled out a video conferencing system, which has improved security by keeping inmates in jail during their arraignments. The department has also benefited from the chief probation officer’s decision to implement Laserfiche content management more than seven years ago.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche,” Eyrick says, “we were storing piles of files that had accumulated over the course of more than twenty years. Organizing everything was a problem, as was finding enough storage room. Laserfiche changed all of that.”

Specific benefits the probation department has realized since implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Without leaving their desks, employees are now able to instantly locate probationary records within the superbly-organized Laserfiche content repository. Staff members are more productive because they no longer have to waste time searching for client files in cluttered filing rooms.
• Easy integration. Laserfiche provider BOLT Document Management created a useful integration with the probation department’s case management system that allows probation officers instant access to clients’ files while viewing case information in the database.
• Storage savings. Scanning old records into Laserfiche allowed the department to destroy thousands of hardcopy documents and reclaim a large storage room that had been in utter disarray. The Court Clerk, who shares the space, benefits from how neat and organized the room is today.

Eyrick’s success with Laserfiche soon attracted attention outside of his department, and it wasn’t long before Darlene Hale, IT director for the entire county, came calling.

The Tipping Point: From One Department to Many

Charged with delivering the most effective and affordable technology to all LaPorte County offices including the auditor, treasurer, probationer, surveyor, juvenile detention and more, Hale had noticed a few problems with the way content management had been rolled out county-wide. Chief among them was that, in the years before she’d taken the helm, individual departments such as Eyrick’s had been allowed to choose and deploy their own preferred IT systems. As a result, interoperability was lacking, sharing information was difficult and costs were high.

It was time to standardize.

In the course of Hale’s research, she determined that if one of the content management systems already in use could be expanded, the cost of conversion wouldn’t be quite so high. Two systems rose to the top: Laserfiche and Docuware. Ultimately, after talking to Eyrick and his department, comparing features and functionality and considering ROI, Laserfiche won out.

According to Hale, “The biggest thing that sets Laserfiche apart from other content management solutions is the sheer ease of use. The layout is simple and intuitive, so it’s easy for users to pick up, but just as important for IT professionals like me is that it’s also easy to administer. Setting up templates and user licenses, integrating it with other products and external applications: everything is just so easy.”

BOLT helped LaPorte County migrate the content stored in Docuware into Laserfiche by completing the following five steps:

• Examining the document and information structure of the old Docuware repositories.
• Obtaining samples of documents and data from every unique document set.
• Using the samples to determine the logic and structure incorporated in the repositories.
• Creating a unique conversion program for each document set.
• Importing and testing samples from each set in Laserfiche.

Once the testing was successfully completed, the conversion process began—one department at a time.

Each phase of the migration project was carefully defined and scheduled, since departments needed continuous access to stored content even while the process was underway. Employees were allowed to look up existing information in Docuware, but to prevent “orphaned” records, staff was not allowed to make any additions or changes. After the process was complete, the converted information was mounted as new volumes to the county’s Laserfiche server. BOLT then installed and configured the Laserfiche client software on department computers and trained each department’s personnel.

Users Love Laserfiche

Although LaPorte County now has centralized control over all of its content (ensuring that information from all departments can easily be shared), Laserfiche grants each department the flexibility to adapt the system to the way they work and manage their files. “Our users love Laserfiche,” Hale explains. “It just has so many more uses and capabilities than what they were using before.”

The county, too, has reaped the benefits of standardizing on Laserfiche. Overhead costs for content management have diminished, and information management throughout county offices has dramatically improved. In addition, all of the advantages that Steve Eyrick’s probation department realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche—increased staff productivity, storage savings and easy integration with mission-critical applications—have now materialized for all of the departments under Hale’s purview.

“Better system, more functionality, lower overhead costs, excellent ROI,” Hale concludes thoughtfully. “What’s not to love?”

Washington County State’s Attorney, Hagerstown, MD

When attorney Brett Wilson signed on with the Washington County State Attorney’s office, tape recorders, photos, notes and witness verbal testimony were brought to bear in the daily routine of trying cases. Film footage and a movie projector provided an occasional change of pace.

In the last few months all those prosecutorial tools have been rolled into one, which Wilson now says has transformed his job as never before in his twenty years before the bench. The prosecutor’s office has merged its Laserfiche document management system with the Washington County District Court’s Nomad public address system to put trial evidence and testimony into a whole new light.

“Sometimes it seems like the jurors are watching ‘Law and Order,’ only it’s live,” Wilson says referring to the popular television courtroom drama series. “It’s a whole new way of communicating with the court and jury.”

Instead of pulling papers out of briefcases, drawing diagrams on chalkboards, or setting up movie projection screens where, hopefully, most of the court can see them, Wilson and his colleagues just plug their laptops into the Nomad system and call up the evidence needed from court case files stored in the Laserfiche system back at the office.

Instantly, photos, illustrations, diagrams, sworn statements or signed confessions flash on monitors in front of the judge, clerk, witness box, defense table, and on two, 48-inch flat-screen TVs in front of the jury box. Telestrator technology allows attorneys or witnesses to draw on the images on the TV screens, doing for courtroom testimony what football commentator John Madden did for instant replay.

After the image is amended through the testimony provided, it’s then stored back into Laserfiche as a new version, with a hard copy printed out and entered into the court’s trial evidence file. It’s a little like Perry Mason meets Monday Night football, Wilson says, and it’s made a dramatic addition to courtroom testimony.

“We can illustrate for the jury all kinds of things from the image stored on Laserfiche,” he says. “Location of evidence, where an incident took place where the lighting was and what type of evidence was found.”

Wilson used a recent case involving a hunting accident to illustrate the Laserfiche/Nomad system. When a bullet had torn through a home in a housing development, hunters who were perched on a rocky outcropping on a neighboring farm ended up facing charges of criminal negligence.

An aerial photo of the farm stored in Laserfiche was called up from the case file and displayed on the court system of monitors and flat-screen TVs. The prosecuting attorney then illustrated on the image where the bullet was found tracing a clear path to a rocky knoll. The hunters were convicted but of lesser charges, in large part because the Laserfiche/Nomad system made clear their stray bullet may have been careless but not criminal.

“Pictures work a lot better when you can work better with them,” Wilson says. “By being able to display the image that way and mark where the hunters were and where the evidence was found, we provided concrete visuals for things that eventually helped the court make a better judge the case.

In another instance, video footage of a drug buy taken with a hidden microphone and camera by a police confidential informant proved the key in making the conviction. When the drugs and money changed hands the prosecutor was able to freeze the image and zoom in. Technology turned everyday court room testimony into a production worthy of the popular Hollywood television program CSI, Wilson says, all on 48-inch flat-screen TVs in front of the jury.

“The CSI effect is very much in effect,” he says. “And the jury’s ability to digest that information on widescreen TVs right before them can make a very big difference in the outcome of cases.”

In each case, the visuals made it much easier for the jury to make up its mind, Wilson says. Being able to call up such a range of images from Laserfiche in court makes it much easier for Wilson and his colleagues to do their jobs.

This system is the latest expansion of Washington County’s drive to go paperless. It all started two years ago with a presentation by Jeff Sauter, of the Eaton County, MI, prosecutor’s office, according to Washington County State’s Attorney Charles Strong. Since Sauter installed his Laserfiche system four years ago, he’s spoken about the many benefits of embracing paperless technologies, most centered around organizational advantages: never losing case files, less duplication of paperwork, faster access to files, remote and simultaneous access to files. Strong’s office wanted to take it a step farther and use it as a trial tool.

After Sauter’s presentation, Strong got the green light from his own IT people and the Laserfiche software was installed a year ago. Washington County has since been back-scanning archives and started using the new system in earnest just the past few months, Strong says.

Laserfiche WebLink gives attorneys open access to the database from the WiFi-enabled courthouse. Quick Fields instantly indexes scanned items as they are being stored into Laserfiche allowing Washington County to keep current with incoming documents while digging deep into the office’s massive archive, storing it all in Laserfiche. The office’s juvenile court files have been back-scanned into Laserfiche and now the Washington County staff are working on other departments.

“We still have old paper files we were forced to work with, but that number is going down daily,” Strong says. “We’re very satisfied with Laserfiche. It’s been a life saver. Instead of having all that paper flying around, we were able to centralize everything.”

While the Nomad system helps present testimony much more effectively, Laserfiche is the steward of that all important documentation, Wilson says.

“It’s the workhorse that makes sure those testimonial documents are right where they need to be when they need to be. Laserfiche is particularly helpful during sentencing and motions hearings when unexpected demands for documents such as a criminal record, are more common,” Wilson says.

“It gives you a feeling of comfort knowing that if something is in the case file and scanned into Laserfiche, it’s also right there with you in the courthouse,” he adds.

York County Court of Common Pleas, York County, PA

A short distance to the northeast in Pennsylvania, the head of the York County Information Technology Division, Al Raniero, said his office is also interested in Laserfiche’s potential in the trial setting. With the multi-faceted, multi-departmental Laserfiche system the county’s judicial agencies already have in place, York is definitely well on the way.

York County’s court system is three years into its push for paperless operations and has reached deep into the system’s various legal operations along the way. The Sheriff’s office, including their central booking office, the county jail; adult probation; children and youth services; Clerk of Courts office and divorce courts all use Laserfiche document management in various capacities.

Where the system is breaking new ground is using Laserfiche in real-time for court testimony in what’s called the county’s Divorce Masters Office. These officials are appointed arbiters in disputed divorce cases. Before the matter goes to court the Masters review the arguments from both sides in an effort to plot a course for the case in court. What happens in court can deviate from the sworn depositions submitted beforehand. When it does, the Divorce Master calls up the sworn statements stored in Laserfiche in real-time to see where testimony may have strayed from earlier statements.

However, when it comes to testimony in criminal cases, that documentation must still be displayed through conventional means on an audio-visual cart burdened with overhead projectors, tape players and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations downloaded onto laptops. All for display on a single large-screen TV for the entire court to view.

York County’s Laserfiche repository has plenty of photos and even streaming video that could all play a useful evidentiary role in court proceedings, but now must be retrieved from Laserfiche and converted into more traditional media for display on the AV cart. As more and more documents, film or photos are being stored in Laserfiche, improving the availability of that documentation in the trial setting seems as useful as it is inevitable, Raniero said.

“We could take it to that next step, that would be something that I would definitely like to discuss with the court,” he said. “That’s very doable for us as well.”

One stumbling block is how the system might be accepted by outside attorneys, Raniero said. Attorneys with varying technical skills come into the courthouse, and bringing them all up to speed quickly on such a novel system could be a challenge. The county is working hard in that department, expanding Laserfiche throughout the entire county court system.

The reluctance by some judges and court staff in York to embrace the technology early on has yielded to a wholehearted endorsement of its continued expansion—which has resulted in some 15 million court documents being stored in Laserfiche.

A computer terminal in the court clerk’s office now provides access to those files to members of the public. York is also working on a project to provide remote, password-secure access to the court case database through Laserfiche WebLink for private attorneys practicing in the York area.

“By the end of June we hope to have 15 million documents available to 400 attorneys practicing in the area,” said York Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey. “Our court administrators are committed to the imaging project.”

So committed that Raniero wants to go farther still. Plans are in motion to install computer terminals in York’s 19 district courts, so judges there have direct, real-time access to Laserfiche throughout the county.

Such instant access has already greatly streamlined York County’s ability to take other judicial matters out of the courtroom. Video cameras, monitors and electronic signature pads posted in the judge’s chambers and the county Sheriff’s central booking facility have taken arraignments out of the courtroom almost entirely.

With Laserfiche WebLink, arrest histories and outstanding warrants are available to the judge in real-time in his chambers so there is no hand copying and delivering of those documents for each arraignment. The judge also appears on a monitor in central booking’s processing room for a video arraignment of the prisoner, who no longer has to be transported to the court for live arraignment.

Someday, judges will have immediate access to documents stored in the county’s Children and Youth Services department’s Laserfiche database when they are hearing dependency cases.

Raniero is setting his sights on new horizons as old ambitions are achieved in York’s roll-out of Laserfiche throughout more county agencies. Seed money from Congress and continued funding from property deed filing fees provided by York’s Records Improvement Fund have moved the three-year project along. Now, Raniero says he’s wondering if federal stimulus money might also be applied to new projects.

One idea Raniero is considering is a tracking system for paper-based case files. Right now, Laserfiche Audit Trail tracks access to confidential court files stored in electronic format, even as that access is opened up in the next few weeks to hundreds of attorneys who practice in the county’s court system.

However, paper files are still required from time to time and tracking them can be trickier. So, Raniero is proposing placing tiny microchips within the paper file folders. That way, court officers can know when files have been removed from county offices and where they’ve gone.

That technology, and the expanded use of Laserfiche documents in real-time trial settings are still a little way down the road. Raniero said. As new technologies are adopted and implemented new applications continually surface that promise new efficiencies. York County’s courts are proceeding judiciously and with deliberation, Raniero said.

“My approach is to do everything in phases,” Raniero said. “We need to walk before we run.”

The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”

The county published its RFP in December 2006, and soon after a committee drawn from several county offices (District Clerk, County Clerk, Auditor, Sheriff, Tax Office, Juvenile Probation, Adult Probation, Purchasing, IT and Records) determined that Laserfiche (as bid by reseller MCCi) was the best fit for Collin County.

Anderson notes that she had had county-wide support from the start. “The success of the project is directly attributable to getting these larger user departments involved in both identifying the requirements for the RFP and making the selection,” she says.

Anderson had visited the Laserfiche booth at past ARMA conferences (an active ARMA member, she was a presenter at last year’s conference and is scheduled to present again at this year’s conference, October 15-18 in Orlando, FL). Anderson looked to Laserfiche for three things: its scalability and extensibility; the Laserfiche Toolkit, for integrating Laserfiche with existing and planned software applications; and the Records Management Edition (RME), in order to manage retention for electronic documents.

“RME provides a standard methodology for administering the state mandated retention requirements for all records as well as providing an audit trail for disposition,” Anderson says. “And all of this occurs in the background, so it’s transparent to the user.”

Collin County installed Laserfiche in mid-2007, followed by its first production implementation that November, starting with 100 user licenses and 500 WebLink retrieval licenses just to accommodate cross-departmental use.

The first offices to deploy were the District Clerk, County Clerk (which handles vital records, land recording, and county court at law records), District Attorney, Auditor and Records Department. Because the county was migrating from a legacy system dating from the ‘80s, a massive backlog conversion to Laserfiche was first priority. “Records was actually already scanning for the DA and Auditor, so we switched this to Laserfiche first,” Anderson says.

In the District Clerk’s office, a massive backlog conversion of documents from 1846-2000 into two million images added to the county’s Laserfiche system. “While we eliminated some paper files, we did keep the 1800s paper files for their historical value,” Anderson notes.

When it came to the auditor’s office, the County focused on integration to optimize business processes. “We added a property tax receipts interface with our RT Lawrence receipt processing system,” explains Anderson. Because the tax assessor/collector relied on paper documents, the 10 days it took to process mail resulted in over $1 million lost each day in interest. The county was able to get the assessor’s office up and running by the end of the year to coincide with the heaviest period of property tax receipts.

“Now we process payments much more quickly—up to 10 days faster,” Anderson says. “In fact, we eliminated almost 400 records storage boxes just with this one Laserfiche implementation.”

The County Clerk’s Office also uses RME as the back end for the court’s case management system, where it provides records retention for closed and inactive case files.

Finally, the Justice of the Peace, which manages traffic, truancy, small claims and evictions records, came onboard in June 2008.

With an implementation this extensive, there were understandably some hiccups along the way. “One of the mistakes we made was only purchasing one license each for Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Real-Time Lookup,” Anderson says. But with the approval of the FY2009 budget, the County will be adding Workflow, to be installed when the county upgrades to Laserfiche 8 by the end of the year, as well as additional licenses for ScanConnect, Quick Fields, Zone OCR, and Real-Time Lookup.

The biggest hurdle, however, hasn’t been what modules to use. “I’d say one of our biggest initial challenges was helping departments understand their business processes so we could develop a records series plan tied to record management and retention,” Anderson says. “It’s really an educational process.” Anderson and her team of what she calls “Customer Department Advocates“ employ business plan questionnaires, user guides and demos of successful intra-county implementations, and even help departments choose the right scanners.

These Advocates identify training needs, review business processes, records series structure and templates, and scan sample boxes of files into Laserfiche so departmental staff can see how their records series and template structures will work in the new environment.

As more departments successfully use Laserfiche, even more want to get on board. The Commissioners Court has a planned deployment through September 2009, which includes implementations in IT, the Auditor’s Department, Development Services (permitting and animal control), Human Resources, Sheriff’s Office records, Tax, Motor Vehicle and Purchasing.

“We based our 2009 deployment plan on several factors, including percentage of permanent records maintained for the department, volume of records, distributed accessibility requirements, and overall reduction in paper storage space in the new administration building for the departments moving their this year,” Anderson explains.

The County’s still quantifying ROI from using Laserfiche, but Anderson can point to a windfall of newfound efficiency.

“By using Laserfiche and changing the internal process to take advantage of the system’s new capabilities, the Auditor’s accounts payable office has already identified 300 hours of staff time saved, and reduction in volume of file folders and labels formerly used to place each paper copy of a check and the backup into a separate folder on their departmental shelving,” Anderson says. “The internal audit staff is able to review case files and receipts as part of their auditing process —freeing Auditor-, departmental-, and records staff from pulling paper files for auditors to review.”

Then there’s the peace of mind knowing that Collin County’s doing its part to provide better and more sustainable customer service now and in the future.

“We’re finally getting a handle on our electronic records, even though it’s going to take three to five years to fully implement,” Anderson says. “And we’ve definitely enjoyed faster response time when a customer or citizen requests a file. Even better, multiple users can access the same record from different locations simultaneously.”

Speaking of simultaneous, Anderson says that her biggest obstacle is handling the requests from remaining departments to implement Laserfiche. “The hardest thing I have to do is tell someone, ‘Not yet –can I work with you to make sure your needs are included in next year’s budget?’”

But as Collin County is proving department by department, the results are worth the wait—and the planning time.

Business Processes In this Case Study:

• Accounts payable
• Automated life cycle management
• Back-end records retention
• Backlog conversion
• Business continuity
• Case management
• Internal auditing
• Microfilm conversion
• Property tax processing
• Transparent records management
• Web retrieval

According to Records Manager Margaret Anderson, staff in the county’s courts had difficulty finding information, due to disparate systems implemented by each department. “We also had over 15,000 reels of microfilm and 18,450 boxes of paper stored throughout the county,” she says. “Files were everywhere and we couldn’t keep up with the demand. We had to ensure that staff did not unintentionally destroy records that needed to be retained, and we wanted to implement a case management system (CMS). But we also had to manage all the paper.

“Our first step was to select and implement a new case management system for the county court system,” Anderson continues. “The records management system (RMS) we chose needed to interface with this system and provide records management control for closed and disposed case files, as well as support documents.”

Anderson found the ideal solution in Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME), which centralizes scanned paper and electronic records while automating records retention and destruction. “What I like about Laserfiche is that I can manage electronic documents, paper, microfilm and audio and video files enterprise-wide,” Anderson says.

Collin County’s journey to provide order to their paper-based legal system began with a two-year project in the district court clerk’s office, converting paper case files from 1846-2000 into archival images—a total of over ten million images.

Anderson then expanded the plan to manage archiving, retention and management of case files for the county court, integrating RME with the county’s CMS. RME provides back-end records retention for closed and inactive case files. “It’s very easy to use, and it helps us meet our goal of providing quality, cost-effective public service,” she notes.

Laserfiche also helps the district attorney’s office operate more efficiently. “We’ve scanned felony case files into Laserfiche, which has been great,” Anderson says. “Our old content manager didn’t have full-text search capability, and it didn’t manage records retention. With RME, it’s easy to manage retention periods, which can range from 25-50 years, and it’s simple to locate information.”

Anderson realized the value of the county’s Laserfiche system when a flood in May 2007 damaged nearly 1,000 boxes of records—many of them with no backup. “It’s clear how important Laserfiche is for business continuity,” she says. “Had those files been stored in Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have needed to worry when the flood waters started rising. People worry about computers crashing, but in reality, paper documents are much more likely to be destroyed than digital ones.”

Laserfiche also offers the flexibility Collin County needs to expand enterprise-wide—while still meeting each department’s unique needs. The county is implementing Laserfiche in the property tax department to digitally store copies of checks, stubs and letters received as part of the annual property tax receipting process. Planning for the next budget cycle includes integrating Laserfiche with SunGard® HTE in the auditor’s office to manage accounts payable documents. The development department also plans to integrate Laserfiche with its existing GIS application to manage septic system records. Eventually, most county records will be stored in Laserfiche and will be viewable over the Internet.

“I’ve been really pleased with the system,” Anderson says. “But what I’m most looking forward to is expanding our records retention plan to include electronic records—which will make us better prepared to comply with e-discovery orders.”

Anderson isn’t the only one who’s pleased. County staff have been so delighted that they’re spreading the word to other departments. “The response to Laserfiche has been so positive, that it’s been difficult to keep up with demand for new installations,” she says. “I’ve just had to start saying ‘No’ nicely—and tell them ‘You’ll just have to learn to wait your turn.’”

That’s the lesson from 2008 Run Smarter Award winner Thurston County, WA. Until implementing Laserfiche in 2007, the rustic county, peppered as it is with forests and Puget Sound waters, was beset with what could best be described as information management logjams.

But in less than two years, Thurston County has evolved its use of Laserfiche from a pilot project handling backlog conversion to the backbone of a department-by-department phenomenon. In short, Thurston County has realized the very essence of what it means to Run Smarter.

The County must have heard other departments’ pleas, because suddenly several departments’ annual IT portfolios had requests for imaging systems. The County’s IT Manager, Brian Ferris, stepped in with the authority from its Information Technology Committee (ITC) and Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), and the search for an enterprise content management (ECM) system was on.

Back in 2006, IT Consultant (and now Laserfiche Administrator) Bonnie Hilyard and appointed imaging committee members were given the task to look at bringing an enterprise content management system into the county for all the departments to use. There was additional urgency because the overflowing records building had already spilled over into a second storage building. “We were looking at possibly needing a third down the road, and we knew we had to stop the insanity,” she recalls.

The imaging committee’s vision for the County’s ECM system was more than simply a virtual storage building. “The system would have to do more than address both our short-term and long-range needs for document imaging. We definitely needed an application that had open architecture, regional support, Web capabilities, document and records management as well as a powerful workflow engine,” she says. “Plus, a huge requirement was the ability to integrate with all of our existing business applications.

The County’s initial goal was to meet current and anticipated business requirements for 10-15 years, promote efficiency of county operations, save the time and costs of filling public record requests, as well as to save storage space. Whatever system they chose would have to allow for decentralized use for all levels of staff through easy desktop access, as well as the ability to integrate primary business applications with the system—all while providing multi-level security features.

What Hilyard and the team were looking for was a solution as enterprise-wise as it was enterprise-wide. Where did she find one?

“The county identified requirements for an Enterprise Imaging system and then released a Request for Proposal based on those requirements. After an extensive review process which included matching the county’s requirements with each proposal and visits to other jurisdictions in Washington and Oregon that used the proposed systems , we determined that Laserfiche was the best choice” Hilyard says.

“One of the biggest moves for us was to be able to certify the system we purchased with the State of Washington State Archives Certification process,” she adds. “This certification would allow us to eventually destroy some of the paper documents that were scanned into the system—a big move for shrinking our storage costs.” This was such a big move, in fact, that Hilyard and her team made sure only records associated with the records retention schedule set by the Secretary of State were added to their system.

Initial implementation was rolled out in three pilot offices: the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO), and Development Services Department (DevSvcs).

The BOCC had ordinances and resolutions dating back to the 1910s, as well as board meeting minutes that staff scanned into Laserfiche. Almost immediately, citizens and staff could search and print out documents themselves, which was a huge time saver for the board’s secretary. Says Hilyard, “Now she scans them in and they are automatically posted to the Web with WebLink. She can then send an e-mail notifying everyone that it’s posted, and she’s done.”

Next, Hilyard’s team is installing Laserfiche in the PAO, mostly due to the office’s sheer amount of paperwork. By law, cases must be kept for at least 20 years, but this retention period can stretch even longer when the appeals process is included. After an outside vendor scanned 3.7 million pages into TIFF files, Hilyard’s team used Quick Fields to automatically import them into file structures organized by year. As the documents were imported, Laserfiche’s OCR engine automatically extracted searchable text, simplifying retrieval. In 2009, Hilyard says, the PAO hopes to be scanning the documents as they come in, but she’s realistic about the process.

“We know that this transition will be hard on some staff, so we’re not going to completely eliminate the ‘safety folders’ at this time,” she says. “We’re hoping the attorneys will see they can use their laptops to locate all the up-to-date paperwork for the case in the court room or office.”

To help the effort, Hilyard’s team designed a folder structure where each case has its own file folder so all subsequent incoming information could be routed to these folders by staff using Snapshot or through Laserfiche Workflow.

“We decided to go this direction because as a case is closed, Workflow will move the active folder to the Records Management module to begin its records retention,” Hilyard says. The PAO has almost finished linking Laserfiche (through an application programmable interface (API) created by VPCI) with their Damion business application.

Next, Development Services Department technical staff and VPCI programmer are working together to create an API for their business application, Amanda, and Laserfiche using Web tools, a project, Hilyard notes, that is now 80% complete.

With pilot projects underway in the first three departments, Hilyard started looking across all departments to see who could benefit from the relatively new system. She admits, though, that for as inevitable and organic as the County’s enterprise-wide adoption of Laserfiche seems now, it wasn’t always easy.

“Implementing such a large scale roll out has been challenging for myself and our Records Manager. Keeping up with the demand for all the scanning requests has also been a big challenge,” notes Hilyard. “It’s amazing now that the cat is out of the bag how many people in the county are knowledgeable about this technology. I hear no negative comments about the implementation, just a lot of thanks.”

Up next is exploring the possibilities of Laserfiche 8, which TC implemented just this month. “I’m hoping that maybe somewhere along the way I can find the time to learn how to use the Toolkit myself so that I can develop API’s internally,” Hilyard muses.

Somehow, she always finds time to sing the praises of Laserfiche to local governments. “I recommend Laserfiche on an ongoing basis. I share all my stories, documents and knowledge whenever I’m asked,” she says.

“It’s nice to have a community in Washington and Oregon State where we all get together and share. You know you’re not alone and if it’s something that can be done, maybe it’s already done and I don’t have to re-invent it.”

Faced with trying State v. Valentini, the largest gambling conspiracy case in Arizona history, criminal defense attorney Howard Snader knew his old paper-based system wouldn’t work any longer.

“I was retained in a criminal defense matter where the state’s discovery documents were provided in digital format,” Snader says. “Although I could read the documents, I couldn’t search them in any meaningful way.”

Snader found that opening every single page was cumbersome and completely ineffective. “I would have had to print each page as I read it, and with more than 30 defendants and an initial discovery of nearly 150,000 pages, that’s a significant amount of paper,” he explains. “I would have spent weeks reading and marking the necessary evidence, and I’d have to do it each time I needed to prepare another motion.”

“In Arizona, court systems are forcing attorneys to move into the 21st century, because many of them are now providing all evidentiary documents electronically,” says Greg Dutton, managing partner of ArcWare Solutions, the Laserfiche reseller that oversaw Snader’s Laserfiche implementation. “From our experience, law firms in Arizona are significantly behind the curve and need to catch up.”

Snader’s firm was a prime example of this. “I believed I had no need for document management, so I had no system in place,” he remembers. “After I saw what Laserfiche could do, I realized the need was there. Not only would I be able to deal with the ongoing discovery of police reports, medical records and financial statements, I’d also be able to securely archive files, destroy hard copies and save on storage fees.”

A practicing attorney since 1988 and a certified specialist in criminal law since 1995, Snader knew that minimizing time spent on discovery and money spent on storage was key to his firm’s success. When he found Laserfiche, he knew that its upfront cost would return enormous dividends. “I really looked at Laserfiche as an investment,” Snader says. “The ease of access, support and training, as well as the software’s capabilities, made this the best choice for my practice.”

Dutton believes that, like Snader, many attorneys underestimate the utility of a document management solution. “Case preparation software does only what it was designed to do. Laserfiche can provide case preparation functionality, as well as manage all of the documentation for the day-to-day business of your entire practice, including accounting, billing and HR records,” he says.

“When you consider that attorneys receive information in so many formats—including paper, PDFs and other types of electronic documents—a system that can manage all those disparate formats from a single screen ends up providing an incredible ROI,” Dutton adds. “In fact, Laserfiche could be a law firm’s single best software investment.”

Faced with the mountain of evidence in State v. Valentini, Snader wholeheartedly agreed. “With Laserfiche, it’s not just about saving time, money and providing a valuable resource for clients—which it certainly does. It’s also about competitive advantage. Laserfiche is a powerful tool that enables me to show prosecutors and clients the strength and weaknesses of a case by just pushing a few keys.”

In fact, with Laserfiche’s sophisticated search tools at his disposal, Snader was the first defense attorney in the case to submit a motion to remand for his client—and the only one to submit his motion by its original due date in June.

“I’m amazed how quickly and easily I can locate information,” he says. “I was able to show the prosecutor that he failed to provide any testimony on a key issue, simply because I could immediately find the information.

“That would have been incredibly time-consuming with boxes of documents or printed PDFs,” he adds.

Dutton agrees, “The way the county provided documents to Mr. Snader made discovery even more difficult—and Laserfiche even more important. Because each page was provided as a separate file, it was quite difficult to tell what pages belonged to what records.

“Worse yet,” he adds, “it was nearly impossible for someone without technical know-how to figure out. But by using Laserfiche, in just a matter of hours, I was able to reconstruct all the discovery documents, fully migrate them into Laserfiche, make every page full-text searchable and teach Snader to do it all himself.”

“It took less than four hours to get Laserfiche installed and for me to learn how to use it,” Snader says. “Laserfiche’s help tools are phenomenal, the tutorials are excellent and the software is very user-friendly. It has a learning curve like any other software, but the end result was much better than I expected. I’ve definitely saved more time than I thought was possible.”

Snader plans to complete the discovery issues in State v. Valentini and continue on to scanning and archiving all his closed files. In fact, Laserfiche has even helped him market himself, as he can handle larger cases with even larger volumes of discovery documents.

“Laserfiche is a perfect complement to my growing practice,” Snader says. “It’s an easy-to-use product that provides fantastic results and is a great value for the cost.

“Other products may be less expensive,” he adds, “but they certainly don’t provide the same quality or capability.”

Imaging Supervisor Marc St. Laurent.

The Kern County Superior Court has a metropolitan division in Bakersfield, CA, and three regional divisions with seven branches. Staff had been microfilming case files for many years, but, according to Imaging Supervisor Marc St. Laurent, this solution was far from ideal. “Microfilm was never a good storage medium,” he explains. “Court cases can be active for many years, so we frequently need to add probation reports or other information to the case file. We had to re-film entire files when we added a single piece of paper, and it was very difficult to find information.”

Staff knew they had to replace this antiquated archiving system, so they began searching for a flexible, cost-effective solution that would meet everyone’s needs. “We knew we needed to make files more accessible for judges, but the technology had to be extremely user-friendly,” St. Laurent says. “Our court clerk also needed to respond to records requests more quickly. In fact, we wanted to make case files immediately available, rather than making customers wait 2-3 days.”

The court chose to implement a Laserfiche^® digital document management solution because it met all these needs. “Our previous clerk was very technology-minded, and he really grabbed the bull by the horns,” St. Laurent remembers. “We didn’t have any technology in the regional courts—in fact, most of our branches were storing files in trailers in the parking lot. So we knew the regional courts were a great place to start rolling out our solution.”

The deployment began with a pilot project in the Lamont regional court, chosen for its smaller size and lower case volume. The court freed up space, improved file accessibility and provided better service, proving that Laserfiche could meet the needs of Kern County’s other courts. Best of all, judges were comfortable with the solution—once they realized that files, in St. Laurent’s words, “were not going to disappear into the ether.”

Fly fishing in the Kern River.

After the successful deployment in Lamont, the court expanded its Laserfiche system county-wide. The enterprise deployment began with court staff scanning closed files. “We began scanning adjudicated case files so they are securely archived,” St. Laurent says. “We’ve gone back six years on felonies and three and a half years on misdemeanors. We’d eventually like to start scanning at the counter, but right now we have such a large backlog of files, we’re just trying to deal with that.”

Staff at each court use Laserfiche to scan case files into the central repository in Bakersfield. The court uses Laserfiche’s flexible file structure to organize its repository by division, and then by year, date and case number. To automate this process, the county’s reseller, DataNet Solutions, designed a custom integration that not only creates the file structure, but also integrates with the state judicial database, the California Justice Information System (CJIS). “This customization is just wonderful,” St. Laurent says. “All our staff have to do is enter the case number, and Laserfiche automatically pulls the name, date of birth and other pertinent information directly from CJIS. Not only does this ensure quality control, it also limits manual data entry, which speeds up filing.” Eventually, the court plans to expand the integration to include CLASS ACT, the state’s civil, family law and probate database.

After files are scanned into the repository, over 300 users county-wide access them using nothing more than their Web browsers—thanks to Laserfiche WebLink™. “WebLink is great, because there’s no software installation required,” St. Laurent says. “Our IT staff find Laserfiche extremely easy to support. We have two staff members managing Laserfiche from the network end, and, because of WebLink, they’re able to handle everything countywide from our Bakersfield location. It’s really a smooth process.”

A view from “The Needles” in the Sequoia National Forest.

And it isn’t just IT staff who appreciate Laserfiche. Court staff find it useful, too—just not in the ways you might expect.

While staff definitely benefit from improved access to information, it’s the security features, like blackout and whiteout redactions, that they really appreciate. “It seems like such a small thing, but to them, it’s extremely important because it’s so useful. They don’t have to take markers to black out witnesses’ names or addresses on arrest reports anymore—there’s been a lot of excitement over that feature,” St. Laurent explains.

Since deploying Laserfiche county-wide four years ago, court staff have eliminated approximately 40,000 files from their records room. Now, instead of calling the records center and waiting for records to be delivered, clerks simply open Laserfiche and retrieve the files they need. When another branch requests felony case files from the Bakersfield office, staff scan the files into Laserfiche, rather than mailing a physical copy. With Laserfiche, authorized staff in any location can instantly retrieve these files—eliminating lost files and saving both time and money.

“Customers probably don’t notice much from the front end, because Laserfiche helps us deal with cases that are already disposed of,” St. Laurent says. “But it has certainly made us more efficient behind the scenes.”

But some customers have noticed the difference. Before Laserfiche, customers seeking files from the regional courts would have to travel to the metro division in Bakersfield. “From the court in Ridgecrest to metro division in Bakersfield is a two and a half hour drive, one-way,” St. Laurent says. “But with Laserfiche, we can help people right at the counter, even if they’re at the wrong building.”

St. Laurent remembers when Laserfiche helped court staff cope with a quintuple murder trial, one of the biggest trials in the county’s history. “About 500 potential jurors were brought in for questioning, and the media wanted access to their questionnaires,” he remembers. “The judge had the idea that, instead of copying hundreds of eight-page jury questionnaires for reporters, we’d scan them into Laserfiche. We created a public folder reporters could access from the media center, which saved our staff a lot of time.

The Kern River valley is a haven for rock climbers.

“The system worked beautifully, and it really exposed the court at large to Laserfiche’s benefits,” he continues. “Because this is a death penalty case, it will automatically be appealed. We’re hoping that the appellate court will let us submit the jury questionnaires on disc.”

Eventually, court staff hope that more county departments will use Laserfiche to enable more efficient information sharing. The sheriff’s department and other law enforcement agencies already have access to restraining orders stored in Laserfiche. Court staff scan the orders into the Laserfiche repository, providing law enforcement officers and 911 dispatchers with immediate access—something that St. Laurent says has definitely increased public safety.

The public defender’s office is also using Laserfiche, and St. Laurent hopes the probation department will be next in line. “This would be very effective. There’s a lot of document flow between our two organizations, and it would be great to have probation reports immediately available to judges at sentencing hearings,” he says.

For the Kern County Superior Court, Laserfiche has proved to be a wise investment, one which St. Laurent would recommend to other courts. “Laserfiche is here to stay as far as our court operations are concerned. You don’t lose files once they’re captured, it’s simple to add information to case files, even years after the fact, and it’s good for customers. It’s a fantastic solution.”

The York County Clerk of Courts Office uses a Laserfiche® digital document management system to manage criminal court records for the York County Court of Common Pleas, whose records are used by 25 other county departments. With over 8,000 cases processed annually and more than $9 million collected in costs, fines and restitution, managing the related documents is a big job.

Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey.

Before implementing Laserfiche, York County faced what Information Services Department Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey calls a “‘sneakernet’ nightmare,” with paper copies as the only reliable means of circulating information. Searching for documents which could be located on any one of sixteen clerks’ desks was becoming increasingly costly. Not to mention that older documents resided five miles offsite and communicating with the county prison—also located five miles away—relied on easily-misplaced faxes.

“With the prison, people were often quicker than the process,” McCluskey says. “New inmates would be turned away because their paperwork hadn’t arrived and the prison didn’t expect them. Or the family would arrive to pick up a released inmate, and the prison wouldn’t know the case disposition, so they wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

After a successful pilot project to digitize minutes from board meetings, York County began digitizing court files in 2005. The first step was to identify major categories or topics of filings, such as “motion-petition-order” or “disposition-sentencing,” which streamlined file organization in Laserfiche. “My staff put their institutional knowledge to work and developed 17 criteria, or file chapters, from the myriad filings we receive daily,” says Clerk of Courts Don O’Shell. “Wendy Bossard, our judicial services manager, and Kathy Groff, our records unit manager, deserve tremendous credit for developing the basic building blocks of our electronic file structure in Laserfiche.”

In 2006, the office began scanning all incoming filings, with the goal of imaging all filings within four hours, or by the next business day for documents received after 3:00 P.M. Staff established a rush process, whereby documents requiring more rapid processing are rushed directly to imaging, docketed and forwarded to a judge, serviced to the sheriff or district attorney, or sent along to defense counsel.

On the recommendation of their reseller, DocuScan USA, the county also set up a system to simplify scanning and filing. They implemented Quick Fields™ with Pattern Matching and Real Time Lookup™, which pulls the case number from the state database and creates a folder structure. Quick Fields also automatically sorts and files case documents, which minimizes staff training. “All we have to do is create batch header sheets with bar codes, and Quick Fields does the rest,” says Front Counter Supervisor Garth Bambling. “It takes seconds for front counter clerks to create batch header sheets, which are attached to the documents and then sent back for scanning.”

The Gates and Plough Complex reflects private and public life in Colonial York.

County-wide access to the Laserfiche repository means that other departments can view scanned documents as they need them, eliminating the need to copy documents multiple times and significantly reducing file requests—making the court and related departments much more efficient. This reduces the need for overtime and promotes better relations among departments, given that staff in other parts of county government can instantly access case files maintained in the clerk’s office. The prison records office also has access to case dispositions and court documents in a searchable format, which eliminates the problem of misplaced documents, as well as the need to physically fax or transport paper records.

The office’s Laserfiche repository stores everything from criminal and juvenile records to miscellaneous docket files, summary appeals and administration files. By early 2006, all files had been imaged from the front end, and, in summer 2006, staff began the back-scanning process. “We had four million documents from 2000 on alone,” McCluskey says, “and we needed to be able to give the judges, probation staff, district attorneys and public defenders access to those documents.”

But not everyone immediately saw value in digitizing case files. “Certain members of the court expressed their preference that imaging take a back seat to the docketing and servicing of court filings, and said that imaging should be accomplished on the back end, instead of on the front end,” O’Shell remembers. “Some even went as far as to cite potential contempt of court proceedings if imaging wasn’t relegated to solely an archival process.”

Yet once the 2006 and 2007 files were digitized, judges began asking for even more documents online. “They found that it made research easy,” McCluskey says, “and they liked being able to immediately respond to questions from attorneys, probation officers and the public.”

To help judges and staff further embrace the new system, McCluskey and her colleagues started a hands-on training program to train staff during the judges’ lunch hour. “This is an ongoing project,” McCluskey says. “We’re training other departments as well. When we first implemented the system, we gave users access to it before we’d trained them, and some users became slightly frustrated because they didn’t realize everything the system could do. We definitely learned from that.”

The Snyder’s of Hanover bakery tour is a favorite in the “Factory Tour Capital of the World.”

And that wasn’t the only thing McCluskey learned. “With a big project like this, it’s important to think in terms of years, not months,” she says. “Just realize that success builds upon success—just focus on getting one thing accomplished, then move on to the next thing. Work in small steps, and before you know it, you’re done.”

The York County program doesn’t just provide faster access to case files, it also helps to ensure business continuity. McCluskey chairs an initiative to develop a countywide continuity of operations plan, of which Laserfiche is a key component. “This is a three-year project that moves far beyond disaster recovery,” she says. “We focus not just on technology, but also people, process and location to identify vulnerability. With departments that only have paper files, like our public defender or our mental health department, what happens if they can’t get back into their building for months? What happens if the files are gone entirely?”

In fall 2007, York County implemented a pilot program to give attorneys access to case files over the Web, and hopes to extend the system even further. The county also plans to implement Laserfiche in both the central booking division of the sheriff’s department and in the children and youth services department, where cases are often open for more than 20 years. The benefits have been so great that the clerk’s office would like to receive superior and supreme court appeals electronically, and they’d like to install touch screens in the courtroom so clerks can enter information and send it to Laserfiche even more quickly.

The progress the county courts have made is impressive. “To us, the biggest change is that the judges who refused to give up paper—the same ones who were threatening us with contempt of court charges if we couldn’t give them immediate access to case files—are now the system’s biggest advocates,” O’Shell says. “We even had one judge tell us the system was ‘better than sliced bread.’ ”

There wasn’t room for one more box of records. About 21 years after the Eaton County Courthouse was built, it had run out of storage space.

The county’s Manager of Information Services, Robert Sobie, decided it was time for the record-keeping revolution he’d been planning. “I have been extremely fond of imaging technology for a number of years.” he said.

Laserfiche Document Imaging, that is.

“Our paper records are the lifeline of what we do,” Sobie said recently. “You cannot process a court case unless you have a case file. You can’t construct a building unless you have a building permit. We need all that information; we just have to store it differently today than we’ve been doing over the past 100 years.”

He consulted Jennifer Tysse, of Matrix Imaging, in nearby Southfield, and together they worked out a system that included a 10-user version of Laserfiche operating on the county’s Novell network.

After the system was installed, it was time to run the old paper files through a scanner, converting their data from words, numbers and drawings on paper to the electronic language of computers. That now is being done in-house by a temporary employee, who “knew very little about computers and nothing about document imaging,” Sobie said.

“But it took us only a day to teach her what to do,” Sobie said. “That’s how user-friendly Laserfiche is.”

The first records being scanned into the system are those of the Construction Codes Department–applications and building permits. In mid-November, the data was being scanned into computer hard drives, but equipment was already on order to switch over to a high-capacity magneto-optical system–compact disks which, unlike the ordinary CD-ROM, can be written over many times.

Next to be scanned in are the county court records, and sheriff’s department records–all the data and photographs of people charged with crimes.

Ultimately, said Sobie, they plan to extend the system to the Registrar of Deeds office. “We’ve been supplying the title companies with microfilm copies of deeds and mortgages after they’re filed,” he said. “We won’t do that any more: we’ll supply them with a week or a month of land-record images on a compact disk that will have Laserfiche software on it as well as the images. The title companies are very excited about that–but what they’re going to like even better–and we’re going to give it to them–is dial-in access to the county network. They’re going to be able to sit in their offices and see those images on our system as quickly as we scan them in.

“I tell you, we’re on the cusp of a records revolution.”

As a former prosecutor, I believe that government functions best when it operates in the public eye,” Brock explains. “At the same time, as a CPA, I want to keep costs down. Thanks to technological advances that allow us to put up enormous amounts of information quickly and inexpensively, we can now do both.”

Currently, Brock’s site provides access to reports on the actions of the Collier County Board of County Commissioners since 1991. The next major step is to add public records from the court itself. “Eventually, people will have access to everything short of the trial strategies for the criminal and civil cases that we are handling at that time,” Brock says.

The repository of records on Brock’s site is powered by Laserfiche WebLink®, a scan-to-the-Web publishing system capable of providing searchable access to millions of pages of documents. Using this product, Board of County Commissioners information becomes available as soon as it is scanned into an Internet-connected database. The process eliminates the need for coding, file conversion, special plug-ins or software in order to view the document. For example, it would take several years for an experienced Webmaster to put 80,000 pages of information on the Internet using HTML coding, the current standard for the vast majority of Internet pages. Brock’s staff was able to create the initial database for its Web site in less than ten hours.

“Using this approach, we can provide instantaneous access to huge amounts of information very inexpensively, especially now that the initial ’supersizing’ of the Web site is finished,” says Brock. “In terms of human resources saved, the system has already paid for itself.”

The office of the Collier County Clerk of Courts is one of the first local government agencies anywhere to commit to putting all its public records on the Internet. Others making similar commitments include the City of Bakersfield, CA; Deschutes and Benton counties in Oregon; and a regional planning council in Brazil. There are more than 30 additional local government agencies in various stages of using Laserfiche WebLink to turn the Internet into a searchable library for their public records. Lakeland, FL-based R&S Integrated Products and Services, Inc., handled the Collier County installation. The repository can be found at http://www.clerk.collier.fl.us/weblink/.