Stepping into a new role can always be tricky; it can be difficult to get up to speed, particularly when the entity you’re joining isn’t organized. It’s safe to say that every organization is going to have a misplaced document somewhere along the way, but the new Clerk of Courts in Marion County, OH was staring down 20 years of jumbled and unfiled court documents, and it was her job to clean it up.
Mounting Pressure
The office had been criticized for years regarding late or missed filings and difficulty of access. The Clerk of Courts at the time, Julie Kagel, defended the office’s work and said that delays were due to low staffing levels.
She later, though, said that she was comfortable with the number of staff in the office and was also questioned about the oddity of her staff not having email addresses. The mounting pressure eventually turned into a criminal charge of dereliction of duty due to the office’s poor performance along with a swift resignation.
A Fresh Face
After Kagel’s removal, the county’s Republican Central Committee selected the Assistant Chief Deputy Clerk and Assistant Fiscal Administrator of Marion County’s Family Court, Jessica Wallace, among 13 candidates. She said that she wants the office to regain the trust of its constituents, which was a daunting task given the state of the office when she arrived. Wallace provided the photo below to the Marion Star showing the type of room she was greeted with upon entering the office.
A Turnaround
Four years later, two of which are from her first elected term, Wallace has been able to clear the 20-year backlog, including filing, data entry, and billing. It didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen without the help of technology modernization. This means that, yes, employees at the Clerk of Courts office now have email addresses. They also now have scanning and imaging processes, online file access, card readers, and e-filing.
By putting consistent, repeatable, scalable processes in place, Wallace can not only be comfortable about avoiding a new backlog, but she can also direct her staff to work on the types of projects a Clerk of Courts office should be working on. For Wallace’s office, this will include a continued focus on technology modernization and an audit of the county’s criminal files to check for accuracy.
Using technology to overcome backlog and accuracy issues is near and dear to our hearts so seeing projects like Wallace’s puts a smile on our face. We do work with many county courts and other government offices to automate their document routing, abstraction, redaction, etc. but county offices shouldn’t feel alone in this issue. In fact, two of our healthcare clients were kind enough to share some of their “before” paper piles. They might be stacked a bit more neatly, but these are problems that anyone reliant on manual data entry can run into.
Two of our health system customers’ paper to be ingested.
The Solution
Extract solves the problem of needing more staff to keep up with your document influxes. Automated routing saves you from needing to triage your documents, automated indexing gets them filed appropriately with the right information, and automated redaction ensures there’s no personally identifiable information in them when they’re made available to the public.
If you’ve got a project at your county that you’d like to solve with automation rather than more manual data entry, please reach out. We’d be more than happy to assess where your workflows could use some help or give you a demonstration of our software.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.