al Center forSc State Courts

Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska

Larry Webster, Project Director John Matthias, Project Consultant

Daniel J. Hall, Vice President Court Consulting Services National Center for State Courts 707 17th Street, Suite 2900 Denver, CO 80202 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1 Background 2 III. Case Management Systems and Business Process Assessment 4 A. Methodology 4 B. Business Processes Reviewed 4 C. Business Processes Affected by JUSTICE Transition 7 1) Changes that May Eliminate Work and Improve Business Processes 8 2) Process Issues that Will Require Changes to JUSTICE 9 3) Required Business Process Changes 12 4) Additional Changes that Should Be Considered 14 D. General Principles 15 1) One-Stop Customer Service 15 2) Immediate Availability of Digital Documents 16 3) Recording Courtroom Activity 16 4) Integrated Justice 16 5) Eliminate Unnecessary Parallel Indexing and Recordkeeping Systems 16 6) Eliminate Disparity of Practice 16 IV. District Court Clerk Organizational Changes 18 V. Electronic Document Management Analysis 22 A. General Principles 22 B. Content Manager 22 C. Project Gabe 23 D. JUSTICE EDMS 23 E. E-filing with JUSTICE 23 VI. Court Policy Environment 24 A. Rule 4-2 Pleadings 25 B. Rule 4-2 Computer Database 25 C. Rule 4-4 Criminal Cases 25 D. Rule 4-6 Dismissals and Settlements 25 E. Rule 4-10 Case Progression 26 F. Rule 4-12 Assignment of Cases 26 G. Rule 4-17 Garnishments 26 VII. Public Access to Court Records 28 VIII. Integration Analysis 29 A. Introduction 29 B. Current CJIS Functions and Interfaces to Be Retained 1) Criminal Complaint 30 2) Prisoner Transport 33 3) Juvenile Court Out-of-Home Placements Oracle Batch Payment 34 4) Attorney Fees Weekly Oracle Batch Payment 35 5) Monthly Ledgers Microfiche 37 C. Information Exchanges to Be Extended or Added in JUSTICE 38 1) Transfer of Case — Bindover and Appeal 38 2) Tax Foreclosure Initiation 40 3) Disposition Reporting 43 4) Retrieve Mug Shot 43 5) Issue/Recall/Served Arrest Warrant Alert and Notification 43 6) Commitment/Release Order ("e-Mittimus") 43 7) Enter Service of Civil Papers Information 44 8) E-mail Integration 44 D. CJIS Interfaces to Be Discontinued 45 1) NCJIS File Transfer 45 2) Protection Order Central Registry 45 3) Electronic Docketing 45 4) Child Support 45 5) District Court Checks 46 6) District Court Payment Warrants and Paid Warrants 46 7) Automatic Check Payments 46 IX. Technical Environment 47 A. Equipment 47 B. Software 47 C. Telecommunications 47 D. Security 48 E. Staff Support 48 X. Data and Document Conversion Strategy 50 A. Data Conversion 50 B. CHARTS Data 51 C. Image Conversion 51 XI. Implementation Plan 53 A. Pre-Implementation Phase 54 1) Agreement between 4th District and State Court Administrator 54 2) Business Process Changes 55 3) Organizational Changes 55 4) JUSTICE System Modifications 56 5) DOT.Comm Decision and Negotiations 57 6) Design of System Interfaces 57 7) Startup Plan 57 B. Implementation Phase 57 1) Gap Analysis 57 2) Interface Development 58 3) Data and Document Conversion Testing 58 4) Installation, Configuration, and Testing 58 5) Report and Document Template Development 59 6) Training 59 7) Business Process and Organizational Change 59 8) Data and Document Conversion 59 9) Start Up 59 10) Interface Implementation 59 C. Post-Implementation Phase 60 D. Costs 60 E. Timeline 62 XII. Project Management and Quality Assurance 64 XIII. Summary 65 Appendix A: Equipment List 66 Appendix B: Agreement for Installation of Justice 67 Appendix C: Justice Information Exchange Model (JIEM) Documentation 70 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

I. INTRODUCTION The National Center for State Courts (NCSC), in response to a request from the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska, submitted a proposal to develop an impact assessment and implementation and integration plan for migration from the CJIS case management system for the 4th Judicial District to the case management system (JUSTICE) used by courts elsewhere in the state. The proposal, based on a draft RFP that was prepared by court officials, outlined a work plan consisting of the following tasks: • Background Research and Planning • CMS and Business Process Assessment • Integration Assessment • Application Infrastructure Assessment • Court Policy Environment • Conversion Strategy • Electronic Document Management System • Preparation of Draft Report • Presentation of Draft Report • Presentation of Final Report • Project Management

The proposal was accepted and began in February 2008. After eight site visits, extensive research, and analysis, the following report has been prepared. It documents the findings of each stage of the assessment and outlines an implementation plan. During the course of the project, a number of issues have been resolved and others have appeared. Getting people together in and of itself, has led to a higher level of understanding and greater desire to work together to make the project a success. The officials and staff of the 4th District are to be congratulated for their vision, dedication, and hard work. The NCSC project team is very optimistic about the future of this effort.

National Center for State Courts Case Management System Migration for the 41`11 Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

II. BACKGROUND The Fourth Judicial District Court of Nebraska is a general jurisdiction trial court serving Douglas County including Omaha. It has a population of nearly 1.5 million residents and sixteen judges. More than 14,000 cases are filed each year. The county includes roughly one fourth of the state's population, 29 percent of its judges, and 34 percent of District Court cases filed in the state. The Fourth Judicial District Court has general, original, and appellate jurisdiction in all matters, both civil and criminal including domestic relations, paternity, felony criminal, equity, and civil cases involving more than $51,000. The District Court hears appeals from the County Court and various administrative agencies. The Douglas County Separate Juvenile Court handles matters involving neglected, dependent, and delinquent children. The court also has jurisdiction in domestic relations cases where the care, support, or custody of minor children is an issue. It has five judges and heard just over 2,500 cases in 2007; about 17 percent of the state total. Nebraska counties with at least 7,000 inhabitants are required to have a Clerk of the District Court elected by the voters. The Clerk of the District Court performs administrative duties associated with the court. Functions of the clerk's office include accepting documents; entering and validating data in computer systems; processing and recording minutes of court activities; monitoring case progress; processing and certifying writs, orders, judgments, warrants, and other documents; sending notices; preparing court files; managing bonds; collecting, accounting for, and distributing fines, fees, costs, and restitution; gathering statistics; processing jail commitments and releases; managing records; working with juries; and a host of similar duties. The courts and clerk of Douglas County are supported by several computer systems. Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) is the primary case management system for the district. CJIS shares information with other systems supporting the sheriff, prosecutor, and others in the county. EDS (Electronic Docketing System) is a system used to prepare and manage orders and minutes of court events. Content Manager is a document imaging system that currently holds roughly four million documents. The juvenile court also uses a stand-alone calendaiing system developed by DOT.Comm, the IT support organization for the city and county. The greatest benefit of the transition to JUSTICE will be the merging of all of these systems into one support mechanism for the clerk and courts. The CJIS system has worked reasonably well, but is aging. The courts desire to join the rest of the Nebraska Judicial Branch by using a case management system known as JUSTICE. JUSTICE provides integrated electronic document management, electronic filing, and other features not currently available in CJIS. The remainder of this report is divided into the following sections: • Case Management Systems and Business Process Assessment • District Court Clerk Organizational Changes • Electronic Document Management Analysis • Court Policy Environment • Public Access to Court Records

National Center for State Courts 2 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

• Integration Analysis • Technical Environment • Data and Document Conversion Strategy • Implementation Plan, and • Project Management and Quality Assurance.

National Center for State Courts 3 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

III. CASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS AND BUSINESS PROCESS ASSESSMENT A. Methodology The NCSC project team used a number of information sources to compare business processes and case management systems. Observation of work routines in Douglas County was the primary reference. Comparative observations were made in Lancaster County, the second largest county in the state, and one that uses the JUSTICE case management system. Sue Nieto of the state court administrator (SCA) staff also provided helpful information based upon her years of service as Clerk of the District Court in Adams County. In addition, documentation of business processes was a part of an earlier NCSC study conducted in 2004. 1 State uniform procedures from the JUSTICE web site also were reviewed. Finally, operational procedures employed in the clerk's office were consulted. All of these resources provide an accurate picture of the operational procedures employed in Douglas County and how they compare with the rest of the state. B. Business Processes Reviewed The following is a list of the business processes reviewed in Douglas County as a part of this assessment. Each process was analyzed in the light of how it was supported by the case management system: CJIS or JUSTICE. In some circumstances, opportunities for process improvement were observed that did not relate to automation support; these findings also are included in this assessment. • Legal Filing o Case initiation o Subsequent filed documents o Child support checks o Check scanning • Writs o Subpoenas o Abstracts of judgment to DMV o Capias o Witness fees (monthly) o Bill of exceptions (for transcript) o Praecipe o Summons o Registration of judgments o Garnishments o Executions o Writs of replevin o Writs of restitution o Habeas corpus o Writ of assignment o Correspondence o Grand jury

I See Achieving Excellence in the Court and Clerk's Office for Nebraska's Fourth Judicial District Volume nvo: An Assessment of Clerk's Office Organization, Operations, and Workload, Appendix C. This document is hereinafter referenced as the Steelman report.

National Center for State Courts 4 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

o Judicial bypass docket • Courtroom Operations (Bailiff) o Scheduling o Journal entry (open and signed orders) o Prisoner transportation o Pull case files • Conciliation Court o Referral o Schedule parenting classes o Information sheet for mediator o Disposition form for court o Record attendance o Payments (clerk collects) o Assign mediator o Track deadlines o Parenting plan o Activity reports o Outcome • Protection Orders o Case file creation o Review filing materials o Refer to judge o Schedule hearing o Maintain entries in state system • Journal o Journal entries o Judgments o Criminal dispositions o Mittimus and sentencing orders o Vital statistics reporting • Court Records o Docket entries o Complete case maintenance o Dismissal for lack of service o Data entry of pleadings and orders o Process governor's warrants o Process extradition papers o Process special certifications o Process special direction orders o Process transfer cases o Interpret and process record requests o Statutory notices and certifications o Prepare certified and authenticated copies o Transcripts, supplemental requests, and notification of appeal o Document scanning o Redaction of personal information

National Center for State Courts 5 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

o Progression dismissals o Amended captions o Certified and authenticated court documents o Payments for documents o Mandate letters o Transcripts for appeals • File Room o File tracking o Public access and copies • Child Support o Orders and judgments o CJIS and CHARTS data entry o IV-D filings o IV-D post-judgment o Payment processing • Child and Spousal Support Validation o Payment status and arrearages o Tax intercepts o Non-monetary support credits o Unclaimed money o Monthly credit accounting o Read and interpret court orders & documents o Redaction of personal identifiers o Calculate interest on child and spousal support arrearages o Prepare certificate of arrearage statements o Apply and credit tax intercepts o Handle adjustment request forms o Apply and credit notarized affidavits from custodial parents • Accounting o Automated clearinghouse o Check processing o Account reconciliation o Fund transfers o Investments o Monitor bonding limits o Bond returns o Payments on judgments o Mechanics liens o Cost statements o Trust account management • Tax Foreclosure o Filing o Docketing o Scanning o Cost computations o Subsequent taxes

National Center for State Courts 6 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

o Deed or order confirming sale • District Court Administration o Minutes for warrants, capias, judge change, attorney change o Arraignment list o Progression letters o Scheduling orders, certificate of readiness o Attorney fees o Protection order docket entries • Juvenile Placement Coordinator o Child support functions o Payment for services • Juvenile Court Courtroom Operations o Prepare and distribute orders o Add person relationships o Scheduling o Mediation sessions o Pull files • Juvenile Court Administration o Subsequent filings o Judge assignment o Calendaring o Noticing o Transportation orders o Attorney appointment o Attorney fee submission and payment o Capias and warrant • Juvenile Court Clerk o File creation and maintenance o Document filing and indexing o Document scanning o Prepare writs, summons, subpoenas, capias, etc. o Customer service on case history o Prepare certified and authenticated copies of court documents o Certify appeals to appeals court o Prepare transcripts o Process transfer cases o Interpret and process requests for documents o Statutory notices and certifications o Court file tracking o Process cases for juvenile review panel

C. Business Processes Affected by JUSTICE Transition This section focuses on business processes that must or should be changed to fit with the new JUSTICE case management system. It also includes suggestions for business process improvement that do not relate to automated support. These processes are listed in four categories: 1) changes that may eliminate work and improve business processes;

National Center for State Courts 7 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

2) process issues that will require changes to JUSTICE; 3) required business process changes; and 4) additional changes that should be considered. I) Changes that May Eliminate Work and Improve Business Processes a) Case Numbering Case numbers in CJIS are assigned manually. Log sheets are kept for six case types (five in the legal filing area, one in the juvenile clerk's area) to maintain the number sequence. JUSTICE assigns case numbers automatically. b) Generating Writs and Other Documents JUSTICE provides extensive document generation capabilities that should allow the creation of most documents directly from the case management system, rather than requiring case data to be typed into word processing templates. This will save court staff a significant amount of time. Currently JUSTICE produces some, but not all, of the documents that are needed in Douglas County and by other courts throughout the state. 2 Some work will be required before these additional documents can be produced. It may first be necessary to obtain agreement statewide on the format and wording of the text before programming work can proceed. c) DMV Abstracts of Judgment The current process for generating abstracts of judgment for the Department of Motor Vehicles is very time consuming. Clerk staff is required to collect all of the necessary information, log in to the DMV web site, complete the abstract screen for each conviction, print copies of the screen, and mail them to Lincoln. DMV reporting in JUSTICE is automatic; no operator work is required other than making complete and correct entries of disposition information. d) Juvenile Court Orders JUSTICE contains a subsystem called Juvenile Docketing that will allow data capture and document production in the courtroom. This subsystem is not yet fully functional for the juvenile courts, but progress is being made. This subsystem will save judges and court staff a significant amount of time and labor. In order to succeed, work must be done by the court to bring more uniformity to the format and content of the orders. This can be accomplished by judges and their staff working together. It will be well worth the effort since current practices are far too labor intensive. e) Vital Statistics Reporting Vital statistics reporting currently includes the entry of data on a web screen supported by Health and Human Services (HHS). This step is simplified in JUSTICE. There are data required by HHS that are not initially stored in JUSTICE (maiden name, place of birth, and date of marriage), that are entered after the judgment. Reporting occurs automatically.

2 For example, JUSTICE does writs of replevin. forcible entry, and detainers. For a complete list, see the next subsection.

National Center for State Courts 8 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

fi Prose Descriptions of Orders The journaling staff currently ensures that the orders of the court are properly described in the journal entry. With JUSTICE, the document is available with a click of the mouse so there will not be so much reliance on the description of the document. This should save staff some time. 2) Process Issues that Will Require Changes to JUSTICE! g) Generating Writs and Other Documents JUSTICE must be capable of producing the following writs and other documents before the Douglas County implementation: • Writ of Replevin • Order of Sale • Forcible Entry and Detainer • Writ of Habeas Corpus • Writ of Mandamus • Writ of Attachment • Garnishment before Judgment • Writ of Assistance • Writ of Execution • Subpoena • Capias • Bill of Exceptions • Praecipe • Summons • Registration of Judgment • Registration of Foreign Judgment • Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction • Writ of Garnishment • Writ of Restitution • Writ of Assignment • Notice of Support Lien h) Judge Assignment The 4th District Court has a unique method of assigning criminal cases to judges at bindover that is interconnected with prosecutor assignments. JUSTICE does not assign cases in this manner and will require modification before implementation. i) Case Progression Notice The 4" District Court will require the development of a notice to parties in civil cases that their case may be dismissed if a proposed scheduling order or certificate of notice is not filed. This notice is required to comply with Local Rule 4-10: Case Progression.

3 The analysis of local court rules in a subsequent section of this report identifies additional JUSTICE modifications that may be necessary.

National Center for State Courts 9 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

j) Juvenile Court Calendaring Juvenile court uses an antiquated calendaring system that fits well with its business practices. This system provides conflict checking and the ability to attach notes to calendar listings that explains the relationship of parties, what occurred at the last hearing, etc. The current application is supplemented by a manual process of keeping paper calendars. Juvenile Court Administration keeps CJIS schedules synchronized with the court calendar with a high level of redundant effort. This is necessary so that noticing and prisoner transportation can function smoothly. Calendar information is recorded in at least four different places in the juvenile court: 1) the calendaring application; 2) the calendar book; 3) CJIS; and 4) log in juvenile court administration.4 This seems to be excessive. The calendaring application is being replaced by Microsoft Outlook in the coming months which can support most of the current functionality; although there are some tradeoffs with respect to quality. Procedures have been developed to allow attorney conflict checking within the court-based instance of Outlook. JUSTICE calendaring provides conflict checking but does not provide varying levels of graphical views of the court schedule. It would be difficult, expensive, and not practical to implement an 'Outlook' type of graphical calendar on the current JUSTICE technology platform. Another issue is the ability to link certain, but not all, parties in a case to a particular event. Improvements in presentation and in linkages between parties and events will be required by Douglas County before the JUSTICE implementation. k) Conciliation Court The conciliation court is unique to Douglas County and is not supported by JUSTICE. The legislature adopted the Parenting Act (LB 554) in 2007, 5 which was effective on January 1, 2008. This provides for a statewide program similar to that in operation in the 4th District. While JUSTICE currently does not support the conciliation court, it must do so before Douglas County can make the transition. A review of the Parenting Act reveals a close alignment with the conciliation court program in Douglas County. The three essential elements of both are mediation, education, and development of a parenting plan. While the ultimate approach to providing automation support to these programs throughout the state has not yet been determined, it is assumed that the attributes of the existing program should be instructive to that effort. The following is a list of functions currently provided for the conciliation court in Douglas County, or that would be desirable in JUSTICE: • Scheduling education programs and mediation sessions • Create case information sheet for mediator • Cover sheet for court file • Create disposition form for court

4 This log contains hand-written information that is not available in CJIS. For example, a hearing may not apply to all parties in a case. CJIS does not have the ability to designate a subset of the parties as required for a hearing. There also may be other parties added by supplemental petition that are not listed. 5 LB 554 is enacted as 43-2920 through 43-2943 in the Nebraska Statutes. Also relevant are the Conciliation Court Law (42-800 through 42-823) and 4 th District Court Local Rule 4-3 D.

National Center for State Courts 10 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

• Referral to conciliation court information, including case dates, parties, children (including ages and other information), attorneys, contact information, domestic violence screening information, state involvement, etc. • Assign mediator • Confidential instructions from judge • Attendance tracking • Payment information • Case deadlines (mediation complete, parenting plan complete, etc.) • Records and reports on all activities • Outcome • Statistical information 1) Prisoner Transportation An extraordinary amount of time is consumed trying to determine if a party scheduled for a hearing is detained or incarcerated, so that transportation can be ordered. CJIS has an adequate mechanism for both checking incarceration status and for ordering transport by directly accessing sheriff information. It is assumed that this access will continue (as it does for County Court) or will be replaced in JUSTICE with something of equal or greater value. 6 in) The Court Journal State law requires that a journal be kept. 7 In most counties, it is believed that JUSTICE docketing entries fulfill this requirement. 8 Eliminating the EDS system and using JUSTICE in its place will be a difficult task in Douglas County. Bailiffs and journal department staff like working with EDS. They claim that numerous outside agencies rely upon EDS outputs. The introduction of JUSTICE will be a difficult transition since EDS is a document-oriented system and JUSTICE is a character-based data system. Despite the many arguments in favor of retaining it, EDS must be eliminated with the implementation of JUSTICE. The use of dual systems wastes a tremendous amount of resources. Those resources can be recaptured and applied to other pressing needs in the clerk's office. A decision must be made as to whether to continue current practices with respect to distributing court journal information in its present form. Other counties seem to operate well without producing these records. If the use of these resources is so institutionalized in Douglas County that they cannot be eliminated without causing significant hardship for other agencies, then JUSTICE queries and reports must be used to replace EDS outputs. 9 The worst possible scenario is to continue the parallel operation of the EDS

6 This capability also includes the ability to show defendants scheduled for sentencing, regardless of custody status. This allows law enforcement and detention staff to attend these hearings when a jail sentence is possible. 7 See 25-2209. 8 One issue is the retention of the journal. 25-2209 allows microfilm to replace bound books for certain court records. Some courts are currently experimenting with computer-output micrographics (COM) to fulfill this requirement. 9 It is currently possible to retrieve this information by case or by day, but there is not mechanism in JUSTICE to allow retrieval of this information by judge. This would require a new query or report to be created.

National Center for State Courts 11 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

system. The court should discuss this issue with external agencies that receive copies of the journal to determine the most appropriate course of action. In Lancaster County, the court creates images of each scanned document in TIFF format, and then uploads them to the state each night. The batch of original TIFF documents is placed on a computer in a public access area. The media can browse all of the public documents filed each day which eliminates the need for access to a journal. While JUSTICE documents will be available through the Nebraska.gov website, they will be organized by case. It is not clear if it will be possible to access all of the documents filed on a particular day. n) JUSTICE is Case-Based and Would Benefit from Better Relationship Mapping JUSTICE is case based, while juvenile courts generally operate on a person-based model. The District Court in Douglas County likely can work within these architectural limitations, but would benefit from system improvements that will allow better mapping of relationships between parties, family members, attorneys, etc. Some enhancements have been made to JUSTICE recently but more are needed. o) Credit Card Payment Processing JUSTICE currently accepts credit card payments for County Courts throughout the state from a central location. The 4 th District needs this capability extended to the District Court for spousal support, property settlement, medical payments, program fees (e.g., What about Children classes, probation fees, and restitution), and court fines. 3) Required Business Process Changes p) Redundant Entry of Courtroom Activity Currently, journal entries are made to describe what happened in court. This journal entry is made in the EDS system. Substantially the same information is entered again into CJIS by the indexing department. With the transition to JUSTICE, there will be a single system to perform this function and the duplicate data entry will be eliminated. The current procedure is for the bailiff (or judge) to compose the docket entry. If the bailiff has prepared it, the judge then approves it. This entry is then reviewed and often modified by journal department staff to ensure that sufficient detail is provided. Finally, it is reviewed, and perhaps condensed, by the indexing staff for entry into CJIS. This is an extraordinary amount of effort with three or four individuals involved in documenting what happened in every court event. In many states, a clerk in the courtroom creates the entry and there is no further review process. This is the preferred approach, with one person documenting the event. In other states, the courtroom clerk makes notes on the calendar and the clerk's office then translates those notes into docket entries in the next day or two. This is redundant work with two people involved, but is more efficient than the Douglas County approach of using three or four. q) Accounting - Explicit Balance CJIS does not carry the balance of financial obligations owed, it only tracks payments made. This is a very unusual approach, one that the NCSC project team has not observed in any other court.

National Center for State Courts 12 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

JUSTICE supports the creation of accounts receivable. When money is owed, entries are made into the system describing the amount and distribution of that amount to various accounts. As payments are made, balances in the various accounts are adjusted accordingly. There are some situations in which the specific amount owed is not known, such as in some child and spousal support cases. For these cases, an end date is entered into the system and calculations are made based on that end date. The end date must be moved out periodically. Creating and maintaining explicit balances will be one of the most significant changes in business process that will be required by the transition to JUSTICE. A great deal of data entry will be required, because there are no receivables balances to move to the new system in the data conversion process. Still, this seems to be a good change for the court. r) Child and Spousal Support Validation Software Many other courts in the state use an inexpensive software package to calculate arrearages in child and spousal support cases. I° This eliminates a tremendous amount of redundant work because the software can retain all of the prior entries and calculations. If there is a subsequent request, the validator is not required to start over and recalculate everything. In Lancaster County, the burden falls to the parties to compute the arrearages in child and spousal support cases, which may be disputed by the other party and ultimately are entered in the order. This order, signed by the judge, may be certified by the clerk. s) Monthly Credit Accounting The child support validators maintain a parallel, redundant system for tracking credits submitted to CHARTS on child support cases. These credits may include credits against child support for social security disability payments, direct tuition payments, medical payments, as well as abatements in child support payments for time spent by the child with the non-custodial parent for vacations. It appears that credits may be occurring that are not authorized by the order of the court. Since CHARTS accommodates these adjustments, it is recommended that this parallel system be eliminated. t) Document Scanning and Redaction In Douglas County, the clerk's office uses a primitive and difficult process for redacting personal information in documents. This process includes five steps: scanning the document; opening the document in a paint program; "painting" over the personal information; printing the redacted document; and scanning the redacted document. It would be simpler to photocopy the document; mark over the personal information with a marking pen or tape, and scan the marked-up document. This approach would be inadequate for redacting historical documents. The Supreme Court of Nebraska recently adopted a rule that assists clerks in dealing with this issue." The parties to a case are required to ensure that certain private information is not included in documents filed with the court or is filed in a separate, confidential

o LegalMath is the name of the package. It was developed in Colorado by Custom Legal Software, and has been customized to support Nebraska's specific requirements. The cost is $149 for the first license, plus $85 for additional licenses. Volume pricing is available if the number of licenses is greater than five. See www.legalmath.com. Neb. Ct. R. of Cty. Cts. 64, adopted April 16, 2008.

National Center for State Courts 13 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

document. If a document is inadvertently accepted, the clerk may mark out the confidential information before scanning the pleading. The JUSTICE system has field-level security that restricts the display of personal information in the case management system data fields to authorized system users. 4) Additional Changes that Should Be Considered u) Document Stamping 12 Legal filing staff spends more time affixing seals and stamps on documents than is typical in a court. Original documents have a seal on the front and a stamp on the back of the last page so the judge knows where a document ends when turning through the pages. Copies of documents are date stamped. Carbon paper must be placed in the court seal to ensure that the embossing will be apparent when the document is scanned. For out-of- state authenticated copies, a gold sticker is affixed to the page and the embossed seal is impressed upon the sticker. In Lancaster County and other courts around the country, electronic stamping machines that include the date and time are used. In other locations, stamps with colored ink are used in place of raised seals. I3 It is recommended that the Clerk of Court consider less time consuming and expensive methods, such as those used in other Nebraska counties to apply the court seal to documents. The state has indicated that this issue will be resolved in JUSTICE before the Douglas County implementation. A process is being developed for affixing a date and time stamp to the image. v) Manual Indexing Systems It was observed in the Juvenile Court Administration area that index cards are prepared when a case is filed. Staff indicated that these cards serve as a backup when the computer system is unavailable. System availability is very high with CJIS, as it will be with JUSTICE. The preparation and maintenance of manual indexing cards is a redundant activity that should be eliminated. w) Case File Management The 4th District Court has an imaging system and scans all documents filed with the court. The District Court works primarily from the paper file and creates duplicate case files in various locations. Separate case files are created by juvenile court administration and by the protection order group. It was also mentioned that the court reporter in the juvenile court keeps a separate file with confidential reports. The transition from CJIS to JUSTICE is an excellent opportunity to improve this practice. Most court staff should be able to rely on the electronic version of the case file. This is much easier if they are Tipped with two computer monitors; one for JUSTICE data and the other for the image.' Two monitors are recommended in all areas where data entry

12 See Steelman report, recommendation nine. 13 A search of the Nebraska statutes did not reveal any requirement for a raised or embossed seal on any court document. The term 'impressed' was used in annotations that referred to seals on certified copies of convictions from other states. 77-1857 gives the county treasurer the option of using an engraved or an ink stamp seal. 14 Two monitors are not required to use JUSTICE. Staff will be much more productive if they can view electronic documents and data entry screens simultaneously.

National Center for State Courts 14 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

on electronic images of documents will be done. System performance must be fast and reliable, and some business issues must be addressed for this to occur. It is not known if the one-day delay in posting scanned images in JUSTICE will be problematic in this regard. I5 x) Juvenile Warrant Log It may be possible to eliminate the log of warrants issued in juvenile court administration under JUSTICE. This log is used to track the execution of warrants and capias. A CJIS report of outstanding warrants is generated monthly. As warrants and capias are executed, they are crossed off the listing and removed from the folder. Better tools are available in JUSTICE to retrieve and manage this information. y) Accounting — Payment Plans The 4th District does not use time payment plans for financial obligations to the court. JUSTICE supports payment plans so this option will become available. z) Accounting - Joint and Several Liability One of the most difficult financial issues in case management systems is joint and several liability. Joint and several liability, which is related to restitution in criminal cases or civil judgments with multiple parties, creates a shared obligation on the part of multiple individuals. It is necessary for a system to accurately reflect the total amount owed, the amount owed by each party, and to adjust the obligation appropriately when any payments are made. For example, three defendants are jointly and severally liable for $1,000 restitution to a single victim. Each defendant must be shown as owing $1,000, but the total for the case is $1,000, rather than $3,000. If a payment of $300 is made by the first defendant, each now owes $700, and the total is $700. This complexity is easily handled with the proper database structure but most systems are not built in this way. Since CJIS does not track explicit balances, joint and severable liability has not been an issue in the past. JUSTICE can track joint and several liability but some compromises have been made in how it is done. This approach is completely acceptable as long as staff is well trained in how to make entries into the system. D. General Principles Some general principles should govern changes to business practices. These principles are long-term goals that, in some cases, cannot be fully realized under the current version of JUSTICE. The current latency in posting electronic images in JUSTICE, for example, will make it impossible to eliminate reliance on paper case file. The in-court JUSTICE docketing modules will also require improvement before judges will be comfortable with them. Nevertheless, all changes in business processes should move the court in the direction of these long-term goals. These are not recommendations for implementation with JUSTICE; only principles to ensure that short-term decisions take the courts and clerk's office in the right long-term direction. 1) One-Stop Customer Service Customers should be able to transact all business in a single location in the clerk's office without going from station to station. Staff should be organized and trained to provide

15 The state could minimize this latency issue by accepting electronic documents from Douglas County several times per day.

National Center for State Courts 15 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

this level of convenience to customers. Technology tools should support the efficient completion of these transactions. This includes data entry activities, scanning of pleadings, payment of fees, and generation of receipts and other documents necessary to the transaction. 2) Immediate Availability of Digital Documents All documents filed electronically, scanned at the counter, received by mail or courier, or generated by the court should be available to system users with very little latency. Backlogs and batch scanning operations cripple justice system operations and force the creation of parallel, temporary, redundant, and unnecessary processes that waste resources and introduce error. Every work location that process received paper documents should be equipped with a scanner. E-filing should reduce the amount of paper sent to the court. 3) Recording Courtroom Activity Documentation of courtroom activity should be completed in the courtroom at the time the activity occurs. This includes the production and signing of documents, creation of journal entries, and scheduling future events. The attainment of this goal will require more sophisticated technology tools than currently are available, as well as more consistent practice between courtrooms. 4) Integrated Justice All transactions between the primary justice system organizations should be completed electronically with appropriate feedback loops and audit trails. Organizations that interact with a high volume on a continual basis are prime candidates for the application of this technology. Examples include the filing of complaints and petitions, service of process, etc. 5) Eliminate Unnecessary Parallel Indexing and Recordkeeping Systems Eliminate all card files, books, logs, calendars, spreadsheets, and other devices that perform functions that are effectively handled by the case management system. If these functions are not adequately performed by the system, then focus efforts on improving the system so that the parallel mechanisms can be eliminated as quickly as possible. Automation of a process means to replace human effort with machine effort. When parallel systems are retained, they increase human effort, rather than decreasing it. 6) Eliminate Disparity of Practice For any automation tool to succeed, it should be matched carefully with the business process that it supports. When consistent business practices do not exist, it is impossible to automate effectively. This does not mean that everything must be done uniformly, but critical differences must be eliminated for a system support the work of court staff. Fortunately, JUSTICE documentation contains very detailed information about most business practices in the court and how JUSTICE can support those business processes. In order to eliminate significant operational differences, it is important to bring the people together (in particular, bailiffs and judges) to determine what must be done uniformly and what practices provide some discretion. When those who are affected make the decisions, it is more likely that process reengineering efforts will succeed.

National Center for State Courts 16 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

In summary, the implementation of JUSTICE should result in less physical effort by staff in doing their work. While some individual tasks may require more work, many will require less. The primary benefit will be the elimination of redundant activity that currently exists.

National Center for State Courts 17 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

IV. DISTRICT COURT CLERK ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES It is clear that the clerk's office would benefit from organizational changes. There are a number of problems with the current structure that hinder the effective and economical utilization of staff Some of the redundant activity that was observed during this study and in the analysis contained in the Steelman report crosses organizational boundaries and some are confined entirely to the clerk operation. The most glaring and problematic is the work of two separate work groups (journal and indexing) to put the same information into two separate systems. The implementation of JUSTICE provides the opportunity to eliminate the redundant systems and work. Changes in operational procedures usually are difficult. When people remain in the same positions with the same roles and supervisory structures for years or decades at a time, the old ways are so institutionalized that it is hard to better see alternatives. Organizational change makes people learn new jobs and get out of their comfort zones. Change can bring vitality and interest back into jobs and employees. There are many approaches to structuring an organization. The most common are to organize around lines of business, functions, or geography. In the justice system, the equivalent to line of business would be jurisdictional organization; juvenile, criminal, civil, domestic, etc. Functional organization groups staff together that do similar kinds of work; filing, records management, journaling, indexing, appellate records, finance, etc. Since most of the employees of the clerk's office reside within a few hundred yards of one another, organizing geographically does not make sense. The current structure is a mix of jurisdictional and functional organization. What kind of structure is best? Organizational development experts often respond with the brilliantly insightful "it all depends." It depends on your goals; it depends on your business problems; it depends on your resources; it depends on your customers. They cannot tell you what is most important; they only give you ideas to help you figure out what you want to accomplish. An important factor in Douglas County is the way the court is organized. The "country docket" approach to organizing the work of the District Court judges makes a similar approach attractive for administrative and clerical operations. If the judges were separated into civil, criminal, domestic, and juvenile divisions, the work relationships and staff specializations would argue for that type of organization in the clerk's office. This makes a functional organizational strategy (exclusive of the juvenile court) the most reasonable approach. There is now some case type specialization (e.g., child support, tax foreclosure, domestic violence) within that structure. Bureaucracies tend to evolve for the benefit of the people who work there rather than for the benefit of the people they serve. In a bureaucracy, the goals of the work group also tend to become more important than the goals of the organization. Organizational change in Douglas County District Court Clerk's Office should focus on providing better customer service and achieving the overall goals of office leadership. Organizational change can be an excellent tool for achieving both of these ends. Beyond these altruistic goals, organizational change should not ignore division of labor and staff specialization (to make individual jobs simple enough that it does not require an advanced degree to be

National Center for State Courts 18 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

successful) and reasonable span of control so a supervisor can have meaningful involvement and oversight of work processes, productivity, and staff morale. The Steelman report contains several suggestions for staff organizational changes. The details of each recommendation will not be reviewed here; the primary points were: • Eliminate direct supervision of departments by the chief deputy clerk • Combine the journal and indexing departments • Organize the office into 1) customer service, 2) in-court case processing, 3) court services, and 4) administrative services departments

The NCSC project team concurs with these recommendations. Some modifications of office structure have been made since the Steelman report was published and the implementation of JUSTICE further changes the landscape for court leaders. Some enhancements to the Steelman recommendations will be offered following explanatory materials. The NCSC project team recommends that the following principles guide organizational change in the clerk's office in the 4 th District: • The new structure should provide for more staff to provide customer service to people who visit, call, or otherwise contact the clerk's office. This will enable more of the processing of the filings to occur at the front counter. • Customers should complete a transaction at one counter window and not be required to stand in multiple lines. • As much work as possible should be completed at the counter (e.g., document scanning, data entry (indexing), document generation, collecting and receipting money, etc. • Customer service clerks should be specialized enough to understand everything they need to know to support transactions in their area (e.g., case filing, service of papers, receipt accounting). This argues for some jurisdictional specialization within the functional organization (i.e., civil, criminal, domestic, and juvenile customer service clerks at civil, criminal, domestic, and juvenile front counter windows). • A similar strategy should be pursued in the long term for supporting courtroom operations. (This relates to the current objectives of the journaling department— to provide an accurate and timely record of courtroom activity and to ensure that all necessary documents, orders, and forms are created and distributed to support the work of the judges and other officials). • Back office functions (e.g., bookkeeping accounting, records management, file room) should support both the adjudication (in-court) and customer service functions.

With these principles in mind, the following modifications are suggested to the Steelman recommendations: • Indexing and journaling staff should be divided into the in-court and customer service areas. The exact numbers that should move into each department cannot

National Center for State Courts 19 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

be determined at this time. Roughly half should be allocated to each area until some experience with the workload is gained and adjustments can be made. • The scanning function should be distributed throughout the office. Batch scanning operations tend to become bottlenecks as backlogs accrue. They also tend to introduce data quality problems. This type of structure forces the court and the justice system to maintain its reliance on the paper file. The goal of an EDMS system should be to make electronic documents available immediately; not to introduce latency into the process. I6 Batch scanning operations also tend to be very tedious for staff members and they typically do not even read the documents with which they are working. Having the staff that accepts the document also perform the scanning and indexing functions maximizes data quality. • Business process changes recommended in this report should eliminate the need for separate tax foreclosure and child support validation departments. These staff and functions should be merged with other broader responsibilities in the court services area. • Data entry as a separate function should be eliminated. Data entry is just one of many tasks required of each functional area of the court operation. Once again, when entry of information into the JUSTICE system is performed by the same individual who works with the customer to complete the transaction, data quality will be maximized. It is better to put the information directly into the computer. • Each individual working at a customer service counter location should be able to accept payments as it is done in Lancaster County and other courts throughout the country. Accounting controls and automation tools make it possible to manage and secure funds paid to the court without centralizing this function. At the District Court in Lincoln, the accounting supervisor only needed a few minutes to balance the cash pouches of all staff at the end of the work day.

Operational procedures are included with JUSTICE documentation, and JUSTICE training will include indoctrination in these procedures. Local variations in these standard practices will be worked out during training. For example, a customer service clerk will receive training in the filing of documents, receipting of money, and all other tasks associated with the use of JUSTICE at the front counter. There should be no additional costs associated with the changes in staff roles. 17 In the end, there is not one right way to organize an office. Very often, decisions are made based on the capabilities and limitations of individuals and the amount of supervision that they need. The clerk should consider office organization to be flexible and fluid, not cast in concrete. Periodic changes should be made as circumstances change, as staff becomes more comfortable with new responsibilities, and as workflow requires. It should be possible to experiment with new structures and revert to old ways of doing business if the changes do not produce the desired results.

16 These benefits will not be realized immediately with JUSTICE, since images are batched to the state server overnight. It is hoped that this will change when a transition is made to the next generation of EDMS technology. 17 The NCSC is not in a position to offer estimates of the cost of physical renovation of the clerk's office to accommodate additional front counter positions. These estimates must be based on a desired configuration and be provided by contractors who will bid on the work.

National Center for State Courts 20

Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

The following graphic illustrates the proposed changes from the organizational structure offered in the Steelman report.

Executive Secretary Deputy Clerk

In-Court Case Administrative • Csuti3m mkt ServiCesii, Processing Services

Public Counter Juvenile Court

Accounting Domestic Violence Mental Health

Child Support

Douglas County Clerk Organization

National Center for State Courts 21 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

V. ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS The discussion of electronic document management systems (EDMS) will be divided into five subsections: • General Principles _ • Content Manager • Project Gabe • JUSTICE EDMS • E-filing with JUSTICE A. General Principles Some general EDMS principles will help in making decisions in the short term as well as long term. First, scanning court records for purely archival purposes is not cost effective. Digital documents offer many benefits to court and clerical operations but those benefits are not realized if staff continues to rely on paper files. Improved operational efficiencies should more than offset the costs of the scanning operation or the EDMS is a waste of time and money. The goal should be to use the electronic case file as much as possible with the new system. Eventually the paper case file should not be needed. Second, the use of scanned documents images is not ideal. Archival PDF (PDF/A) is preferred. PDF offers searchable documents that can be stored in much less space. Eventually, court-generated documents should be created in PDF. With electronic filing, attorney submissions also can be in this format. Scanning of images should be reserved for papers with evidentiary value and for pro se submissions. EDMS in JUSTICE uses PDF, but it is a PDF conversion of a tagged-image format file (TIFF). Raster graphic formats, like TIFF, are pictures of pages and are not searchable or efficiently stored. Adding PDF headers to TIFF images does nothing to improve the efficiency or usability of the documents. The state should convert to a vector graphic format like PDF, which stores the actual text, along with its location on the page and formatting information. PDF is more adaptable to maintaining separate layers for judge annotations and redaction. Third, electronic filing provides a digital representation of a document plus the data needed to populate the case management system for that filing. In other words, a document that is filed electronically actually files itself, eliminating a considerable amount of human effort. There may be quality checks by staff on the data that are provided. Accepting electronic documents without the associated filing data defeats the purpose of e-filing. Finally, the EDMS should support the archiving of case materials. Information that is received electronically should hardly ever be printed and never be scanned. Paper documents that are received should be scanned once. The electronic document should be archived on microfilm, microfiche, or some other suitable archival quality medium. B. Content Manager The current document imaging system was developed, beginning in 1992, with IBM's Content Manager. Originally, the MODCA file format was used. In 1999, the county switched to TIFF. About four million images reside on the system, about half in MODCA format, and roughly half in TIFF. About 25,000 documents are scanned per

National Center for State Courts 22 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

month by all users in the county. The system resides on an IBM AS/400. Indexing information is stored in a DB/2 database. Images are stored on two optical jukeboxes; one with 1.3 GB per side platters, and one with 5.2 GB per side, for a total of 90 GB of storage. C. Project Gabe The current Content Manager application is old, cannot be upgraded, and is obsolete. A faster, higher-volume, and more robust alternative is needed. Improved backup, recovery, and disaster planning also are desired. The county is currently in a procurement to replace the Content Manager system. Other city and county agencies will be added to the new system once it is in place. The new solution will be hosted by a vendor rather than by DOT.Comm and existing images will be converted to the new platform. The plan is to have the new system in place well before the JUSTICE conversion. D. JUSTICE EDMS In the JUSTICE environment, documents are scanned and stored in TIFF format on the local AS/400. Each night, these images are uploaded to a central server at the state level, converted to PDF format, and stored in a DB/2 database. Images are viewed from the case management system through a web browser. Retrieval of the first image in this manner is a bit slow but reasonable. Subsequent pages are displayed much more quickly. E. E-filing with JUSTICE An e-filing effort at the state level was begun some time ago but was recently terminated. This project used LexisNexis File & Serve. It was not widely accepted because of the costs imposed on users by the vendor. The new electronic filing system through Nebraska.gov will operate much like the federal system and will not require an additional filing fee. Users will log in, select a case, provide some case data, and attach a PDF file. JUSTICE data will be included with the filing. Clerks will review filings queues in Nebraska.gov. JUSTICE will return a case ID and judge assignment to the filer. The new e-filing system will first be used in Sarpy County and be implemented in Lancaster County.

National Center for State Courts 23 Case Management System Migration for the 4'h Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

VI. COURT POLICY ENVIRONMENT A review of state statutes, Supreme Court rules, and local court rules was conducted for a number of areas listed under the business process analysis heading including the following areas: • Stamps on documents • Tax foreclosures • Court journals • Conciliation court • Parenting act • Redaction of personal information

That analysis will not be repeated in this section. It does not appear that any statutory impediments exist to the implementation of JUSTICE in Douglas County. The system has been used for many years by most of the courts in the state without issues being raised. The electronic document management system that is a part of JUSTICE also has been used successfully, without challenge, in any of the other counties. If there are problems with public or agency access to court records through Nebraska.gov , they should be ironed out prior to the JUSTICE implementation in the 4 th District Court. The NCSC has published a guidebook that focuses on legal and policy issues related to electronic documents in general, and electronic filing in particular. I8 The SCA seems to have dealt with all of these issues, since electronic filing is now operational. No problems with the 4 th District's use of the system are apparent. The 33 policy areas discussed in the guidebook are summarized in the following list: • Plan and operating procedures • Authorization to accept electronic documents • Technical standards for system use • Agreements between courts and filing parties • Making electronic filing mandatory • Data requirements • Authentication • Provisions concerning paper records • Retention schedule for electronic records • Exemptions from public disclosure laws • Public access to electronic records • Sealing and expungement of electronic records • Collection of filing fees • Electronic service • Electronic document as official record • Procedures for submitting electronic documents

18 See Webster, Lawrence P., James E. McMillan, and J. Douglas Walker, A Guidebook for Electronic Court Filing. West Group. (Williamsburg, VA: 1998.)

National Center for State Courts 24 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

• Attachments, appendices, or exhibits in a different format • Filing time • Standards for organizing, identifying, and indexing electronic documents • Acknowledgment of receipt • Assumption of risk for system failure

A review of the Rules of the District Court of the Fourth Judicial District identified seven areas that may relate to use the JUSTICE system. They are covered individually below. A. Rule 4-2 Pleadings A. Identification. Each pleading .filed with the Clerk of the District Court and each order submitted for judicial action must be specifically identified by type. e.g., Motion (Continuance); Motion (To Compel Response To Discovery Request); Motion (Temporary Allowances); Motion (To Suppress Evidence); Order (Summary Judgment); Order (Show Cause—Contempt). The caption of each complaint or amended complaint in a civil action shall state whether the action is one at law or in equity. Section A defines requirements for titles and captions on pleadings. A review of system documentation indicates that documents generated by JUSTICE meet this requirement; each appears to be titled. B. Rule 4-2 Computer Database D. Computer Data Base. The Clerk and Court Administrator shall each be responsible for keying into the computer data base the attorney identification numbers and the file information for each case, and for keeping the data base current. Section D requires the clerk and court administrator to be responsible for keying in attorney identification numbers and keeping entries current. JUSTICE allows the entry of this information in a similar manner to CJIS. This process should not change in the transition from CJIS to JUSTICE. C. Rule 4-4 Criminal Cases F. Failure to Appear. If a defendant fails to appear and a bond ,forfeiture is ordered, it shall be the duty of the prosecutor to take all necessary further legal action to ensure that judgment is entered upon the bond forfeiture. Section F describes the requirement for the prosecutor to ensure that judgment is entered on all bond forfeitures. JUSTICE records the forfeiture on the register of actions automatically when the bond information is updated. The clerk still is required to make the appropriate adjustments on financial screens, which trigger creation of the register of action entries. The clerk will be able to continue to operate in conformance with this rule and record prosecutor and court action appropriately using the JUSTICE system. D. Rule 4-6 Dismissals and Settlements When a case is resolved by settlement stipulation, the case shall be placed on inactive status until such time as the settlement is consummated, at which time the

National Center for State Courts 25 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

case shall be dismissed. If the settlement stipulation is not consummated ; the case may be reinstated to active status upon the motion of any party. This rule defines a period of inactive status for civil case, while a settlement is being consummated. JUSTICE does not contain an inactive status code. This must be corrected in the JUSTICE system or the rule must be repealed before the transition to JUSTICE. I9 E. Rule 4-10 Case Progression A. Case Progression Standards. In all civil cases in which neither a Proposed Scheduling Order nor a Certificate of Readiness for Trial has been filed within the time frames specified in the Case Progression Standards of the Nebraska Supreme ('ourt, the District Court Administrator shall give notice by mail to each party that, within thirty (30) days from the date of the notice, either a Proposed Scheduling Order or a Certificate of Readiness for Trial must be filed. lf neither a Proposed Scheduling Order nor a Certificate of Readiness for Trial has been filed within the prescribed time, the case will be dismissed by the presiding judge. JUSTICE includes the Cases Exceeding Progression Standards Report which assists the court administrator in identifying cases that require notice. JUSTICE does not contain the notice but creation of this document should be a prerequisite to the JUSTICE transition. F. Rule 4-12 Assignment of Cases A. Assignment of Cases. Cases shall be assigned to a judge by random selection through use of computerized or manual means. Section A of this rule requires random selection of judges for case assignment. Technically, this is not done in JUSTICE or in CJIS. Most courts seek to balance cases assigned to judges, so a judge who has received fewer assignments than his or her peers has a higher probability of getting the next case. This is not purely random assignment. The real objectives typically desired are: 1) equal distribution of cases between judges, and 2) no predictability as to which judge will be assigned to a particular case. JUSTICE satisfies these objectives as well as CJIS does. G. Rule 4-17 Garnishments F. Garnishment Proceedings. Upon receipt by the Clerk of a debtor's request for hearing on a garnishment proceeding, the Clerk shall promptly enter the request into the computer for assignment to a judge and generation of a notice directed to the judgment creditor, lvhich shall be delivered promptly to the Court Administrator who shall mail it to the judgment creditor. The notice shall include the title and number of the case, the date of receipt by the Clerk of the request for hearing, the name of the judge to whom the hearing is assigned, a requirement that the judgment creditor schedule the hearing with the judge's bailiff within 10 days of the date of the filing of the judgment debtor's request, and that the judgment creditor promptly give notice of the hearing to the judgment debtor.

"JUSTICE has a "Waiting" status that is used for active cases that have pending appeals. Perhaps this code could be used for this purpose. The alternative would be to create a new code and to modify programs to pause the computation of progression while the case was in this status.

National Center for State Courts 26 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

The document designated for notification of the judgment creditor in this rule does not currently exist in JUSTICE. It appears that practice may have changed in this area and that this rule is no longer followed. Judgment forms are printed with the garnishment.

National Center for State Courts 27 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

VII. PUBLIC ACCESS TO COURT RECORDS DOT.Comm CPAN (County Public Access Network) currently realizes about $440,000 per year in revenue from selling access to court and other records. It is not clear how this revenue may be affected by the movement of court information to the state system. Since many current customers access more than just court records, it is impossible for DOT.Comm to predict how county revenue from the site will change. The cost of providing hardware, software, networks, and other support of the District Court, juvenile court, and clerk will be reduced in future years, and may generate some revenue for the county.2° Statewide access to court records is provided to parties, attorneys, and citizens through Nebraska.gov . 165 courts in the state place their calendars there. There are roughly 65,000 hits per month on the public access side of the site, and an equal number on the government side. About 18,000 of these hits are on court calendars. The state is likely to realize a significant increase in public access to Nebraska.gov and will see revenues rise. Some of this increased revenue must certainly be allocated to increasing the capacity of the site to handle the increased volume of data and network traffic, both on the public and government web sites. The SCA is increasing its staff to support the use of JUSTICE in Douglas County. The state estimates that roughly $300,000 is being expended for programmer and business analyst time for the conversion and implementation in Douglas County and about $105,000 will be spent on equipment and software. This will cover everything except new scanners and possibly some extra monitors. The state is unable to predict the exact impact of adding Douglas County records to their site. The case lookup fee was increased from $.60 to $1.00 per case on June 1, 2008, to support the cost of making document images available to the public. The availability of these new resources should cause a significant increase in traffic to Nebraska.gov .

20 There will be a transition period of parallel operation, where both systems will be used. Following complete JUSTICE implementation, it is likely that read-only access to CJIS will be required for a time. Eventually, all CJIS data will be completely removed as the JUSTICE transition is complete and all data quality issues are resolved.

National Center for State Courts 28 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

VIII. INTEGRATION ANALYSIS A. Introduction As the district and juvenile courts migrate to JUSTICE joining the County Court on that platform, new methods of information exchange must be developed to avoid disruption of operational processes as parts of CJIS are discontinued. This section of the report defines the business, data, and technical aspects of information exchange that must exist when the transition to JUSTICE is complete. This integration assessment addresses information exchanges between modules and systems using several approaches: 1. Current CJIS functions and interfaces recommended for retention 2. Information exchanges recommended to be extended or added in JUSTICE 3. CJIS interfaces recommended to be discontinued B. Current CJIS Functions and Interfaces to Be Retained The term "CJIS" encompasses a number of separate and interfacing modules: • Juvenile Court CMS (JC) • District Court CMS (DC) • Prosecutor CMS for the County Attorney and City Prosecutor (PCMS) • Jail Management System (JMS) • Sheriff Civil Process • Interface with Oracle Financials

This sub-section assesses integration (information exchange) between CJIS court modules and CJIS modules serving other agencies, and information exchange between CJIS modules and other system such as JUSTICE. As the court moves to JUSTICE, some information exchanges will be retained and expanded while others will be discontinued. This report does not assess stand-alone CJIS functions within CJIS agencies that do not involve information exchange between them and the courts, i.e., internal CJIS functions of PCMS or JMS. If Douglas County moves to replace non-court functions that are currently CJIS modules, this analysis of CJIS functions and interfaces will provide a checklist of court functions affected. County Court (CC) operates solely with JUSTICE. Documentation of JUSTICE and confirmation by user experts indicate that functions used by County Court can be extended to the Juvenile Court and District Court. Table 1: Current CJIS Functions and Interfaces # Information Exchange CJIS Entry Where Used CJIS to CAS to CJIS to Screen CJIS JUSTICE Other 1 Criminal Complaint Complaint PCMS/CC X Juvenile Complaint BCF PCMS/JC X 2 Prisoner Transport PTU Jail/All X X Courts

National Center for State Courts 29 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

3 Pay Provider Fee Batch JVF JC Oracle 4 Pay Attorney Fee Batch CAF CC Oracle JAF JC DAF DC 5 Monthly Ledgers N/A DC Anacomp Microfiche LEGEND IN COLUMN "Where Used": PCMS — Prosecutor CMS (County Attorney and City Prosecutor) CC — County Court JC — Juvenile Court DC — District Court 1) Criminal Complaint The County Attorney and City Prosecutor use CJIS to create criminal complaints in JUSTICE for County Court. Recommendation/Conclusion Alternative Recommendation #1: The Criminal Complaint System of CJIS should be extended to allow the county attorney's staff to enter complaints to initiate Juvenile Court cases and to initiate District Court direct file cases, where the defendant waives preliminary hearing in County Court, in order to go directly to District Court. This interface should be available when the courts implement JUSTICE. Alternative Recommendation #2: The county attorney and city prosecutor should implement the state-sponsored Criminal Case Management System (CCMS) under the auspices of the Nebraska Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. CCMS is a product of Software Unlimited Corporation and an interface has been developed to export criminal complaints from CCMS to JUSTICE. This alternative could be implemented for County Court as soon as CCMS is implemented and expanded to Juvenile Court and District Court when JUSTICE is implemented there. CCMS is implemented in 17 County Attorney offices in Nebraska. Statutes still require prosecutors to deliver paper complaints to the court but data entry for filing cases in the court is reduced because data is pulled to initiate cases. If CCMS meets their case processing and management needs, the county attorney and Omaha city prosecutor should consider cooperatively implementing it and proportionately sharing implementation costs. Current Processes In the county attorney's office, clerks use the CJIS Criminal Complaint System to create criminal complaints for filing in County Court. The process uses manual methods and CJIS screens including BCF, BCR, and BCP. A county attorney clerk receives packets from an attorney who has picked them up from law enforcement. Arrest packets typically contain an arrest report, personal information about the defendant, criminal history, and a handwritten incident report. The clerk uses CJIS screen UPTL to see the County Court Prisoner Transportation List for the day and match arrest packets with prisoners on the list. The screen shows defendants in Douglas County Corrections, the Omaha Police Department facility, and the Youth Detention Center.

National Center for State Courts 30 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

There is a deadline of 11:00 a.m. for reserving prisoner transportation from the facilities, so a complaint must be created before that time in order for a prisoner to be transported for a 2:30 p.m. initial appearance. The clerk marks defendants on the UPTL screen for whom complaints will be prepared immediately and those who will be deferred to the following day. Matching packets with names on the list is also a method of identifying missing packets. The clerk then retrieves data on the defendant by entering the data number and updates the Criminal Complaint System with the following information: • Change statute code to a conversion code (although the conversion code is already shown farther down on the screen — the clerk is trained to change it for an unknown, probably software-related, reason) • Change the date to the arrest date, if the date showing is not correct • Assign an assistant county attorney to the case • Add charges if there are additional charges in the arrest packet not entered by law enforcement • Add witnesses if the reports show them

When complaint data is complete, the clerk prints a copy for an assistant county attorney to review, revise if needed, and sign. The original complaint and copies of documents in the arrest packet are sent to the County Court clerk's office for case initiation. When the County Court clerk's office receives the paper documents at the counter, staff creates a County Court file, retrieves the data from the TRAN-CJIS holding area to create a case in JUSTICE, and assigns it a County Court case number. The Complaint System provides some ability to enter dates of court events and disposition, which functions are not reviewed here. Issues — Alternative #1 1. The Complaint System needs to be modified, to accommodate Juvenile Court requirements for delinquency and dependency (abuse and neglect) petitions. 2. The Complaint System needs to be modified to accommodate District Court requirements. Issues — Alternative #2 1. An interface needs to be developed to make CJIS arrest data available to CCMS. Business Process Diagram The diagram for this process is set forth on the next page.

National Center for State Courts 31 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Complaint 05-07 ox

Prosecutor fld of process aerk Print Corrplaint Transrrit Complaint Retrieve Arrest Enter Crininal lo• and Attorney Crirrinal System Charges Corrplaint Data Sign It Corrplaint Data User Interface 0 0

Transrrit Arrest CJIS 0 Charges

JUSTICE Receive CMS Crirrinal (TranCJIS) Complaint Data

End of process Criminal i Court Clerk Corrplaint Initiate Case with Corrplaint Data

National Center for State Courts 32 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

2) Prisoner Transport Prisoners are transported from jail/juvenile detention to court for initial appearance after they are arrested or for later court appearances while they are still in custody. Requests by court personnel for prisoner transport are fulfilled by jail/detention staff through a prisoner transport request process implemented in_ JUSTICE and CJIS when County Court converted to JUSTICE in 1996. The same process applies to adults at the jail and juveniles at the Youth Detention Center. Recommendation/Conclusion No software modifications are needed to the prisoner transport request process when the District Court and the Juvenile Court convert to using JUSTICE. When the District Court and the Juvenile Court are using JUSTICE, they will use the same process as County Court uses. Current Processes There are two types of situations for transporting defendants from jail/detention: (1) for initial appearance after they are arrested, and (2) for later court appearances while they are still in custody. 1. First Appearance. JUSTICE maintains information on all defendants who have a hearing on a particular day, including the courtroom where the hearing will take place. JUSTICE was modified to check the custody status of defendants by querying the jail management module of CJIS. The prisoner transport coordinator for County Court checks the Prisoner Transportation List, the PTL screen of JUSTICE every morning. One view of the screen is all cases set for hearing and another view is prisoners only. The coordinator requests transportation for defendants who are in custody using the PTU2 screen of CJIS, by entering the following data: • Defendant's Data Number • Date of next court date • Morning or afternoon of court date (AM or PM) • Reason code (01= Jury Trial, 02= Bench Trial, 03= Bond Review, 04= Plea, 05= Contempt, 06= Juvenile Court, 07= Motion, 08= Pre-trial Motion, 09= Sentence, 10= Waiver, 11= Suppression Hearing, 12= Arraignment, 13= Civil) • Courtroom number • Court type (D= District, C=County, J=Juvenile) • Time of court date (military time) • The user presses Enter, then F6 and F12 keys

The "Court List — Prisoner Transportation" shows all of the prisoners arriving for court hearings, via CJIS screen PTRR. County corrections and sheriffs office staff monitor which defendants are needed and when, and arrange transport; taking into account such factors as vehicle capacity, adult/juvenile separation, and male/female separation.

National Center for State Courts 33 -

Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

2. Subsequent Appearances. When the district or Juvenile Court sets a hearing for another court appearance for an incarcerated defendant/respondent, the bailiff in the courtroom or the prisoner coordinator enters the same data as above into the PTU screen of CJIS. The user can cancel transport of a prisoner through the CWRK screen by identifying the court type and date ordered, selecting the person on the list, and pressing the F2 (Delete) key. Business Process Diagram The diagram for this process is set forth below.

Prisoner Transport 05-15.iqx

Enter Bailiff Defendant CJIS User Transport Interface Request

E nd of process

Jail/YDC Arrange Log Transport CJIS User P., Transport of Request Interface Defendant

3) Juvenile Court Out-of-Home Placements Oracle Batch Payment Payments to service providers operate within CJIS and have no connection with JUSTICE. This process pays invoices submitted monthly and is used when the service provider has been paid before and is in the system. The Juvenile Court enters information from a service provider invoice (e.g., out-of-home placement, medical services to juvenile) to Oracle Financials for review and payment. Recommendation/Conclusion Use of the Juvenile Court Out-of-Home Placements Oracle Batch Payment should continue without modification. Process The user enters into the CJIS JVF screen the following information: • Supplier number • Name of the respondent who was provided the service • Docket/page • When the information should be released to Oracle Financials • Per diem • Number of days of service • Credit (if any, such as social security payments) • Total payment.

National Center for State Courts 34

Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

On the selected date, the payment information goes to Oracle Financials which produces an audit run for review, which the user retrieves from the Web Focus website or DOT.Comm e-mails. The user compares the source data with the payment data in Oracle and initiates a correction process if there are discrepancies. Unless the user makes_ a correction, Oracle will produce a payment. CJIS screen JVL displays by facility or service provider what has been paid out. Direct pays don't go through the Oracle batch payment. If a service provider does not have a supplier ID ("site ID"), this may be the first time a service provider provides an invoice, or the service provider is not active often enough to be in the system. The clerk sends the bill to the court clerk who sends a W-9 form to the service provider. When the W-9 form is returned, the clerk assigns a supplier ID and authorizes payment. Business Process Diagram The diagram for this process is set forth below.

Pay Service Provider Fee Batch 04-16.i x

_ . r I 1 I , . Yes .1 Ente ■ Provide( 1_0,1 Review Aualt (No further - I Invoice Data 1 1 Review Report 1 \ / action needed) Clerk CJIS I I i i .. r User No Interface —1-- c

Correct Data Error

'.

Transmit CJIS a— --._ Invoice Data i.. .., Ii

[End of process

Oracle Generate Audit Generate Financials Review Report Check

4) Attorney Fees Weekly Oracle Batch Payment Payments to attorneys operate within CJIS, and have no connection with JUSTICE. The Juvenile Court pays appointed counsel through Oracle Financials weekly. This batch process is used when the attorney or firm has been paid before and is in the system. Direct pays don't go through Oracle in this kind of batch process. The District Court and County Court also pay appointed counsel.

National Center for State Courts 35 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Recommendation/Conclusion Use of the Attorney Fees Weekly Oracle Batch Payment should continue without modification. Process The user reviews attorney statements/invoices and enters the following payment information into the JAF screen of CJIS: • Bar number (Oracle supplier number) • Name of the defendant/respondent who was provided the service • Docket/page • When the information should be released to Oracle Financials, and • Number of hours of service

County Court uses CJIS screen CAF while District Court uses DAF. CJIS calculates the attorney fee at the hourly rate appropriate to the kind of service in the court. On the next Sunday, four-part forms are printed at DOT.Comm along with an error report if the attorney's Oracle supplier number is not found. On Monday or Tuesday, a Juvenile Court judge signs the orders and the data flows from CJIS to Oracle. Oracle Financials produces an audit run for review which the user retrieves from the Web Focus website or DOT.Comm e-mails. The user compares the source data with the payment data in Oracle and initiates a correction process if there are discrepancies. The user separates the four- part form and mails the attorney a copy, and files the other copies. Direct pays don't go through the Oracle batch payment. If an attorney does not have a supplier ID (site ID), this may be the first time they provided an invoice, or the invoice is an exceptional kind (e.g., court reporter fee, indigent publication fee). The clerk sends the bill to the court clerk who sends a W-9 form to the attorney. When the W-9 form is returned, the clerk assigns a supplier ID and authorizes payment. Business Process Diagram The diagram for this process is set forth on the next page.

National Center for State Courts 36 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Pay Attorney Fee Batch 04-16.iox

nd of process , ) ol Enter Attorney I 1.1 Review Audit Yes OK? Generate Send Copy to Invoice Data Review Report i Cover Sheet Clerk's Office Clerk CJIS User Interface

Correct Data Error

Transmit CJIS Invoice Data

Oracle Generate Audit 3 Financials Review Report

5) Monthly Ledgers Microfiche CJIS currently sends ledgers from District Court to Anacomp (program name: GDCDC246) to turn into microfiche. Statutes require permanent retention of records and microfiche is the only media for this. Microfilm and microfiche are the only permanent retention methods for court records in Nebraska. The state is working with the State Archives to expand or replace this with some type of electronic media alternative but all permanent retention is on microfilm or microfiche. Recommendation/Conclusion JUSTICE has the capability of creating output to microfilm or microfiche, so no software change is needed when District Court and Juvenile Court convert to JUSTICE. Process Every District Court has a way of meeting retention requirements. Some counties have an in-house department that microfilms for the whole county. Other counties contract for microfilming — Douglas County uses Anacomp. The National Association of Counties (NACO) in Nebraska affiliates with Fountaine Microfilming, which microfilms for many of the counties. Issues JUSTICE has the function Record Microfilm Information (RCDMICR) where the roll and frame of the microfilm is recorded for each pleading so the microfilm can be retrieved from the State Archives. A business analyst should verify that similar information can be entered for the microfiche that Douglas County produces to enable its retrieval from the State Archives.

National Center for State Courts 37 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

The District Court and Juvenile Court should prioritize the list of potential information exchanges. Some are clearly more important than others. C. Information Exchanges to Be Extended or Added in JUSTICE The JUSTICE information exchange functions in this section (a) are used in County Court and should be extended to District and Juvenile Court, or (b) are suggestions for addition to JUSTICE, enhance staff productivity, and improve service to court constituents. Table 2: Summary of Candidate JUSTICE Information Exchanges Information Exchange Where Used Data Source Data Now Destination 1 Transfer Case — Bindover, Appeal N/A CC DC, PCMS 2 Tax Foreclosure Initiation CJIS County Attorney Sheriff, DC 3 Disposition Reporting CC CC, JC, DC State repository 4 Retrieve Mug Shot N/A JMS CC, DC 5 Issue/Recall/Served Arrest Warrant CC CC, JC, DC PCMS,JMS Alert and Notification 6 Commitment/Release Order On Paper CC, JC, DC JMS, YDC ("eMittimus") 7 Enter Service of Civil Papers CJIS internally CJIS CC, JC, DC Information 8 Email Messaging On Paper Any Any LEGEND: PCMS — Prosecutor CMS for the County Attorney and City Prosecutor JMS — Jail Management System YDC — Youth Detention Center CC — County Court JC — Juvenile Court DC — District Court 1) Transfer of Case — Bindover and Appeal Two types of case transfers in JUSTICE from the County Court to the District Court will be used when the District Court converts to JUSTICE: bindovers and appeals. The County Court will follow the procedure in the following Criminal Checklists and Appeals Checklists manuals for JUSTICE: • How to Process Bindovers to the District Court • How to Process a Civil Appeal to District Court • How to Process a Civil Appeal to District Court Filed in Forma Pauperis • How to Process an Appeal within a Civil or Criminal Case to District Court • How to Process an Appeal within a Civil or Criminal Case to District Court when Filed in Forma Pauperis • How to Process a Criminal Appeal to District Court • How to Process a Criminal Appeal to District Court Filed in Forma Pauperis

Transfer Case Data JUSTICE facilitates transfers of cases from one court to another. Statewide, most bindovers are transferred electronically on JUSTICE, as well as appeals from the County

National Center for State Courts 38 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Court to the District Court. The District Court is currently using paper source documents to enter bound-over and appealed cases. Using the transfer feature of JUSTICE for bindovers and appeals should reduce data entry in the District Court clerk's office. Recommendation/Conclusion No software modifications are needed to implement bindovers and appeals when transferring case data from one court to another when the District Court converts to using JUSTICE. Transfer Bond/Cost Data No automated process for transferring bond data is available during bindover from the County Court to the District Court, or for transferring filing fee or cost data for civil and criminal appeals when the case is added to JUSTICE or transferred electronically from the County Court. Populating the District Court case with bond data in bindovers and cost data in civil appeals will save data entry effort and eliminate errors during data entry. The same applies to appeals from the County Court to the District Court. After an appeal is completed, data on costs collected in the District Court may need to be transferred back to County Court. Recommendation/Conclusion Alternative #1: Maintain the manual process of the District Court entering bond/cost data when a case is transferred from the County Court, and in the County Court when case cost data is transferred back from the District Court when an appeal is disposed. Alternative #2: Modify JUSTICE to transfer County Court bond/cost data to District Court when a case is transferred from County Court, and to County Court when case cost data is transferred back from District Court when an appeal is disposed. Transfer Bond/Cost Funds Bindover requires that a bond executed in the County Court be paid to the District Court. Payment is received in the District Court in the form of a check from the County Court. Bindover Ten Percent (BOT) bonds are entered in the amount of the check received from the County Court and require a money receipt on JUSTICE. In an appeal, the County Court collects the District Court filing fee and generates a check. It seems inefficient for the County Court to generate a check to the District Court to transfer a bond. ACH payments do not carry any information to identify who the money belongs to or why it was sent. Recommendation/Conclusion Alternative #1: Maintain the manual process of County Court generating a check and District Court depositing the check when a case is transferred from County Court, and generating a check to County Court from District Court when case costs collected in District Court are transferred back when an appeal is disposed. Alternative #2: Modify JUSTICE to transfer County Court bond/cost funds to District Court via ACH when a case is transferred from County Court, and back to County Court when case cost data is transferred back from District Court when an appeal is disposed.

National Center for State Courts 39 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

The District Court would need a list of bonds being transferred within a given timeframe, run daily or on demand in order to facilitate matching receipt of an ACH payment with a particular bond. Issues DOT.Comm raises the issue paraphrased, "Should filing information be transferred directly from JUSTICE/County Court directly to JUSTICE/District Court, or from one to the other through CJIS?" If the latter is true, DOT.Comm suggests that it will have to develop an additional interface from the County Attorney Complaint System. Recommendation/Conclusion Bound-over case information can be transferred directly from JUSTICE/County Court directly to JUSTICE/District Court without the involvement of the Complaint System. The case can be marked in the Complaint System as "bound over" and assigned to the felony division of the County Attorney's Office. No additional interface is needed. 2) Tax Foreclosure Initiation Tax foreclosure initiation currently operates within CJIS and has no connection to JUSTICE. The County Attorney tax foreclosure department works with the County Treasurer, Clerk of the District Court, Register of Deeds, and the Sheriff's Court Services Bureau to foreclose on properties which have been offered for sale and not sold for want of bidders at the tax sale. Current Process The tax foreclosure specialist in the County Attorney's Office receives a list of properties the county will foreclose and conducts a title search of the properties. The title search produces a list of names and addresses of all interested parties to each cause of action (mortgages, deeds of trust, land contracts, judgments, pending lawsuits, estates, etc.). The County Attorney's Office prepares a Complaint containing 30 to 60 causes of action, one for each tract. As part of the initial process, the names and addresses of each interested party are entered in a matrix in CJIS. The Sheriffs Court Services Bureau uses this information already keyed by the County Attorney's Office to serve parties and prepare returns of service. The Clerk of the District Court files the complaint with the multiple causes of action and later files and dockets returns of service received from the sheriff. The County Attorney's Office also files a notice of Lis Pendens with the Douglas County Register of Deeds, to enable the public to search the status of properties in litigation and look up parties in interest. Issues with the Current Process One feature of the current process is that multiple properties are included in a single District Court case. The current method requires a case to stay open as long as there is one tract that has not been resolved. It also complicates tracking payment of service fees because of the large number of parties in a court case. When the District Court currently receives a tax foreclosure case, the caption only has the first name, et al. The clerk's office then types the rest of the defendants' names in the system although this data entry was already performed in the County Attorney's Office. The data is thus re-keyed and is indexed by name/plot, etc.

National Center for State Courts 40 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Other counties including Lancaster have changed to one tract per District Court case. As a result of the switch to JUSTICE, Lancaster County is accurately collecting the costs and fees for each case vs. dividing the costs among the number of properties in each case. When a case for an individual tract is finished it can be closed, not dependant on cases for other tracts. Recommendation/Conclusion Alternative #1: The Criminal Complaint System of CJIS should be extended to allow the County Attorney's staff to enter civil petitions to initiate tax foreclosure cases. This interface should be available when the courts implement the conversion to JUSTICE. JUSTICE should be modified for e-mail integration (see below), to send party information to the Sheriffs Court Services Bureau for service of process. Alternative #2: The County Attorney should implement the state-sponsored Criminal Case Management System (CCMS) under the auspices of the Nebraska Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. CCMS is a product of Software Unlimited Corporation and an interface has been developed to export criminal complaints from CCMS to JUSTICE; this interface, however, should be modified to allow filing a civil petition to initiate a tax foreclosure case in District Court when JUSTICE is implemented there. JUSTICE should be modified for e-mail integration (see below), to send party information to the Sheriffs Court Services Bureau for service of process. The source of data in tax foreclosure cases is the County Attorney's office which files the petitions. Both of these alternatives will reduce data entry by the District Court Clerk's Office, and continue the availability of information already keyed by the County Attorney's Office to the Sheriffs Court Services Bureau to serve parties and prepare returns of service. Business Process Diagram The diagram for this process is set forth on the next page.

National Center for State Courts 41 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Tax FornnInsure Initiation 05-07 inx

Prepare Case Transmit County Receive Tax Perform Title with Multiple File Case in Addresses of Attorney - Certificate List -• Search of • Causes of District Court Parties for Civil from Treasurer Properties Action j Service j

- Ned step: Respoi

Sr Pleading or Defer

Receive and Make Docket File Returns of File Case E n tri es District Service Court Clerk A

Complaint Returps of Service

V

Receive CJ IS Addesses for Service

Sheriff Retrieve Prepare Court Addresses of • Serve Parites Returns of Services Parties for Service B ureau Copies of Service Complaint

This process beg ins after properties offered at a tax sale and no one bid on the property, so the county forecloses on the property to get title and turn over the property for redevelopment.

National Center for State Courts 42 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

3) Disposition Reporting The function TCJDISP in JUSTICE reports dispositions for Traffic/Criminal/Juvenile cases, currently used in County Court for its cases. When District Court and Juvenile Court migrate to JUSTICE, they will use the same function. Recommendation/Conclusion There are no issues requiring consideration when planning to extend disposition reporting to District Court and Juvenile Court. 4) Retrieve Mug Shot Judges in adult criminal court in other jurisdictions report that they find it helpful to see a photograph of the defendant appearing in court for assurance that the correct person is there. Recommendation/Conclusion After consultation with the presiding judge of the County Court, there is no concern that ability to view a mug shot would help judges except in the rare circumstance that two prisoners have switched identities; it is more a jail management issue than a judicial one. 5) Issue/Recall/Served Arrest Warrant Alert and Notification Criminal Administrative Procedures require that a court should issue warrants to a single law enforcement agency to facilitate accurate control over the status of each individual warrant: the sheriff in Douglas County. "It is the responsibility of the court to see that law enforcement agencies are in possession of only active warrants and that proper recall procedures are implemented." The courts and the sheriff rely on the transmission of paper warrants. The same applies to service of a warrant; the sheriff sends the paper return of service to the court, and the status of the warrant in JUSTICE does not change until then. Recommendation/Conclusion The Sheriff's Court Services Bureau warrant section maintains original warrants on file and no information exchange from or to JUSTICE would facilitate this process. A paperless approach would likely require statutory changes. The Sheriff's Office should continue to have view access to JUSTICE. 6) Commitment/Release Order ("e-Mittimus") Currently, the jail and YDC receive a commit or release order after an overnight CJIS batch run based on data entered by a bailiff In the meantime, jail and YDC staff takes notes in court and make operational commit/release decisions without official word from the court. Occasionally there is some mistake in communication. Release from custody is usually a high priority event and this information should be communicated to the jail or detention center as soon as possible to make space available as a matter of economy, as well as fairness to the individual. Recommendation/Conclusion Assuming that bailiffs will enter commitment and release dispositions in JUSTICE shortly after the event occurs in the courtroom, jail and YDC staff will (a) have hard copy to take with them back to the jail/YDC, and (b) be able to access the information directly in the JUSTICE docket.

National Center for State Courts 43 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

In-court docketing and immediate production of court orders using JUSTICE will create a single authoritative source of information about commitments and releases, and the court's order will be available online. 7) Enter Service of Civil Papers Information Paper returns of service and the original document served are dropped off at the courthouse by a runner from the Sheriffs Court Services Bureau several times per day. The runner also picks up new documents to be served. The sheriff captures service information in CJIS for internal use and it could be transmitted to the court electronically with paper or scanned images to follow. Recommendation/Conclusion Continued use of a manual process for transferring data and documents between the sheriff and the courts can continue as at present without degrading service. Creating an interface from CJIS to JUSTICE to transmit this data would not be fixing any problem; it would speed up the transfer of service data. Court rules require that the sheriff file a return of service document with the court and a rule change may be required to perform this function electronically, which would be accomplished by transmitting data about the return of service or by transmitting an electronic document, or both. The speed of communicating this swiftly to the court does not make a compelling business case by itself, but will become more compelling when the Sheriffs Court Services Bureau upgrades automation of its internal operation and data and documents are routinely handled electronically. 8) E-mail Integration E-mail is generally a stand-alone function that can be used within a court and with justice partners, on an ad hoc basis to handle exceptions, ask questions of other users, and perform other communication tasks. E-mail is a powerful tool if it is integrated with a case management system that is configured to generate case-related e-mails automatically when an event occurs or a condition becomes true. JUSTICE has the capability to be integrated with Microsoft Exchange Server or whatever e-mail system a county supports. Recommendation/Conclusion The state should consider integrating JUSTICE with the e-mail package selected by the state and develop triggers to automatically send an e-mail upon occurrence of a configurable event or condition to persons or roles in a court or external justice partner. 2I This will open an additional channel among court employees and between the court and its justice partners; reducing data errors by allowing copy/paste operations to recipient information systems. Examples of communications to justice partners are: • Service requests to the Sheriffs Court Services Bureau • Appointment of the public defender or conflict counsel to a defendant • Order for probation to conduct a presentence investigation

21 This capability exists with the current state court e-mail package.

National Center for State Courts 44 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

• Order for probation supervision

Some court processes do not proceed, either by rule or by practice, until a paper document is generated and arrives at a destination. JUSTICE users should be encouraged • to identify business processes that can be improved in speed or capacity through e-mail integration. D. CJIS Interfaces to Be Discontinued Several current interfaces will be discontinued because JUSTICE will handle the data transfer duties. 1) NCJIS File Transfer CJIS currently sends District Court dispositions to the Nebraska Criminal Justice Information System (NCJIS), the central state repository of criminal history. JUSTICE performs this function. • Program Name: GDCDC155 • Frequency/Interval : Daily/Workdays

CJIS also currently sends Juvenile Court referrals to NCJIS. JUSTICE performs this function. • Program Name: PR.GJCDC01 • Frequency/Interval: Daily/Workdays

2) Protection Order Central Registry CJIS currently sends protection orders from District Court to the Nebraska Protection Order Central Registry. JUSTICE performs this function. • Program Name: GDCDC80A, GDCDC80B, GDCD001 • Frequency/Interval: Daily Every 15 Minutes/Workdays

3) Electronic Docketing CJIS currently sends docket entries to the District Court Electronic Docketing System. They should docket events in JUSTICE and use query and reporting functions to distribute the minutes of what happened in court. • Program Name: GDCD001 • Frequency/Interval: Daily

4) Child Support CJIS currently sends child support data from District Court to CHARTS, and CHARTS sends child support data back to District Court. JUSTICE performs this function. • Program Name: GDCPFTPA, GDCPFTPG • Frequency/Interval: Daily

National Center for State Courts 45 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

5) District Court Checks DOT.Comm currently sends information about checks printed by District Court to the county. • Program Name: GDCP001B • Frequency/Interval: Daily

6) District Court Payment Warrants and Paid Warrants CJIS currently sends District Court payment warrants to US Bank, and paid warrants to the District Court through DOT.Comm. The District Court will be able to send and receive data by FTP directly with US Bank. • Program Name: SFTP • Frequency/Interval: Daily

7) Automatic Check Payments CJIS currently receives Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments for District Court. JUSTICE includes this function and produces the Automatic Clearing House Activity Report — (JU5B4509) which prints nightly in courts doing ACH transactions. JUSTICE performs this function. • Program Name: ACH • Frequency/Interval: Daily

National Center for State Courts 46 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

IX. TECHNICAL ENVIRONMENT The technical environment for JUSTICE will be described in the following subsections: • Equipment • Software • Telecommunications • Security • Staff Support A. Equipment The state will provide the equipment for the JUSTICE conversion in Douglas County. This includes an A51400 (maintained by the state CIO) with DB/2 for the application server and all of the necessary personal computers, thin client devices, printers, and scanners. The hardware is usually leased from the state CIO and is replaced every three to four years. In Douglas County, the leased equipment and support may come from DOT.Comm through a contract with the state. The state also supports the centralized EDMS and e-filing solutions. Appendix A: Equipment List contains an inventory of existing hardware in the District Court, juvenile court, and clerk's office, to aid with planning for the transition. An important issue is the need for two monitors on the desktops of staff who will be using the EDMS to view case files. Without a second monitor, it is difficult to work with electronic documents. It is not likely that the state will provide this additional equipment. B. Software The JUSTICE case management system runs on a distributed network of AS/400 computers and is written in COBOL. There is a centralized master name index that allows access to cases in other counties. JUSTICE data is copied to Nebraska.gov for public access. Web services and IBM WebSphere are used for this web version of the application. Douglas County currently uses BlueZone terminal emulation to display mainframe and AS/400 data on personal computer screens. The state relies on the IBM PCOM terminal emulator. It is not known if a change will be required or if BlueZone will continue to be used. Either product should work acceptably. Office suite products will be provided by the state but it is not certain at this point which particular software will be selected. C. Telecommunications The court wide area network is managed by the Nebraska state CIO. Local area networks inside of courthouses are managed by the county or the state, depending on the location. While it is not assured, the state may contract with DOT.Comm to maintain the networks in Douglas County. The current local area network, maintained by DOT.Comm, seems adequate to support the JUSTICE environment, assuming that a similar number of devices will be installed in

National Center for State Courts 47 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Douglas County. One concern is that most of the devices are wireless. 22 It is not known how a temporary drop of a wireless connection may affect the relationship between the client and JUSTICE. These connections should be tested, but the fact that CJIS operates with few network problems is a pretty good indicator that the current network architecture will be acceptable in the new environment. SCA officials have indicated that they will take care of any problems that might occur with the network including wiring devices that currently are wireless if necessary. D. Security The State Court Administrators Office has adequate security in place to protect networks, servers, databases. PCs, and other resources. Regular backup is performed and tapes are stored offsite. They have a backup AS/400 computer available in case a county machine fails. Under most conditions, a court would be able to pass through the network to a machine in another county and operate there until repairs could be made. There is no mirroring or fail-over strategy in place. This is not a problem as long as courts operate with paper files. If the Nebraska courts ever get to the point where they rely on electronic documents, then the availability and performance of equipment and networks becomes more critical. A system or network failure would shut court operations down until service could be restored. The courts of Nebraska should look to the example of the Iowa judicial branch and other states that are similarly situated in devising an approach for a more reliable infrastructure. E. Staff Support Staff support resources are located in the state court administrator's office. There are four programmers, and a fifth will be hired. There are seven business analysts, four for County Court and three for District Court. One technical person and one analyst will be th dedicated to the 4 District for this project. There are two help desks. Business analysts support JUSTICE users. They are available from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Court users contact this help desk when they have problems. The CIO has a help desk to manage hardware and network issues. The court help desk will make this contact, if necessary. The state help desk struggles a bit with customer service—court staff does not believe they do a great job. The SCA has one PC technician to support 600 personal computers, 70 terminals, and 300 printers scattered throughout the state. A recent survey of state court CIOs indicated that the median level of support was one technician for every 125 devices, so staff support in Nebraska is very lean. Adding 186 PCs and 155 printers will require more support resources. Again, DOT.Comm may be able to address this issue. Training is conducted by business analysts every other month in Lincoln and North Platte. There will be on-site training in Omaha to support the implementation. A statewide advisory committee assists with JUSTICE development. This group determines what system improvements are needed and sets priorities for fixes and enhancements. This process seems to be effective and users seem to be satisfied.

22 There are a few token-ring machines in place. Installing cabling to all network devices in the courthouse would be very difficult and expensive. It should only be undertaken if the current wireless strategy proves to be inadequate.

National Center for State Courts 48 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Membership on the advisory committee should be modified to allow input from Douglas County. The 4th District will be one of many courts and will not have as much control over their case management system as they have exercised in the past. It is important to identify critical issues that must be addressed before the transition to JUSTICE to ensure that the court and clerk will be able operate effectively while waiting in line for further improvements.

National Center for State Courts 49 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

X. DATA AND DOCUMENT CONVERSION STRATEGY The conversion of old data into a new format always is problematic. No two systems are the same and code values on one might be more specific or general than on the other. Data structures also vary; on one system an element may occur once per case but on another may be stored in a separate table and allow an unlimited number of entries. For example, one system may store the current mailing address requiring the user to overwrite information if the address changes. Another system might store an address history and require the user to mark the current mailing address for the purpose of producing documents directed to the parties. Obviously, a great deal of information can be lost when moving from one format to another. Document images are much simpler. They are fixed and do not change once the images are loaded into the system. They are connected (indexed) to a case by a single number even though other indexing entries might exist to facilitate easy access. The trick with document images is to ensure that the connection with the case is maintained even when keys might change. For example, converted cases in JUSTICE will have a different case number than they had in CJIS. A simple mistake could result in lost documents, and testing the connection of millions of individual documents is not practical. This process must be done carefully and tested thoroughly. A. Data Conversion The SCA has been through data conversions in the past, including the County Court in the 4th District which used CJIS before the transition. Lessons were learned during that conversion have not been lost since the same staff will be working on the District Court project. The volume of cases is small enough that the data conversion can be accomplished overnight from a backup tape. All District Court case types should be converted at once. This was not done with the County Court and problems resulted. The juvenile court transition should be done separately and later. The SCA will be responsible for the entire conversion. When the County Court moved to JUSTICE, data conversion tasks were split between the SCA and DOT.Comm. Some communication issues between the two organizations resulted in minor problems with the converted data. The problem areas with the County Court conversion related to the different formats in which sentencing information is stored, the sequence of certain records was inadvertently changed, a warrant indicator did not work correctly, and some bond information was not accurate after the transition. The data conversion process already has begun. Technical staff has examined a sample of District Court data. A business analyst is working in Douglas County to map data elements and code values. The process will be complete when every value of every element has been accounted for and programs that will translate and move the data into the new format have been written and tested. As the conversion programs are tested, it will be necessary to have experienced court staff review the results and determine if problems exist. This will be a significant investment of staff time but will be worth the effort. Bad data will be problematic for years to come and should be minimized.

National Center for State Courts 50 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Data analysis programs have been written and data provided to the SCA business analyst. It would be prudent to have court staff involved in looking at this information. There is still plenty of time to clean up old CJIS information and resolve data problems that the conversion process cannot address. This should be a high priority in the months leading up to the transition. It would be very helpful if read-only access to the CJIS data were available for a period of time after the JUSTICE transition. This should be for a fixed duration, not for an indefinite period. This will allow quick checks on the old cases to ensure that JUSTICE data are reliable. Everyone should know well in advance when the plug will be pulled on the old system so staff does not continue to rely on the old application when JUSTICE should be the standard. B. CHARTS Data Another significant area is state child support data. Changes to case numbers will affect the CHARTS system and data conversion will be required. Current references to CJIS case numbers must be changed to JUSTICE numbers. Some coordination with CHARTS support staff will be required to ensure that all of this is done correctly. For cases prior to 1994, the interest flags in CJIS are all set to "Off" In CHARTS, these flags are set to "On." All of these cases must be reviewed and the flag in the CJIS case must be set correctly before the data conversion. In addition, support cases often have two judgments; one for arrearages and one for future activity. CJIS contains only one of these orders while CHARTS contains both of them. This also must be addressed before data conversion. It may be better to convert this information directly from CHARTS, or some combination strategy where data from both systems are used to build JUSTICE cases. C. Image Conversion While document image conversion will be much less complex, there are some challenges that will face court and technical staff The SCA has not done an image conversion project to date so the processes will be new to them. About half of the images are in a format that is no longer supported but that must be converted. The volume of information is so high that six weeks will be required to pull everything out of the current system. As has been mentioned in the technical environment discussion, document images are stored on two optical jukeboxes maintained by DOT.Comm. The DB/2 database containing the indexing information is on a separate system. TIFF files can be moved directly from one system to the other, but the indexing information will require processing like the data files. New keys must be built from the old data, but this will not be a difficult job. Since the documents will be indexed in JUSTICE, it will not be necessary to store separate case information; only a single key in JUSTICE will point to the image location. MODCA images will require conversion to the TIFF format. Utilities are available to perform this conversion; the state elections organization did this recently. Finally, the TIFF images must be converted to PDF before being placed on the state EDMS server. Documents must be moved off of the existing system one volume at a time. Two volumes can be done per evening and there are currently 150 volumes. The nice thing is

National Center for State Courts 51 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

that most of the volumes are full and new images are only being written to a small number of platters so document conversion can be spread over time without serious consequences. Optical platters are not being constantly rewritten like magnetic drives. The final wrinkle is that DOT.Comm is working to move all electronic documents to a • new platform in the near future. If this is done, it may solve the MODCA conversion problem and provide faster alternatives for offloading court documents when it is time to move to JUSTICE.

National Center for State Courts 52 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

XL IMPLEMENTATION PLAN There are four primary sources of information to inform decision making for the JUSTICE implementation. The first is the experience of SCA staff in Lincoln. They have been through the implementation process many times and already have encountered and overcome many of the obstacles that Douglas County will face. The second source of experience lies with County Court staff that experienced the JUSTICE transition of criminal cases in 1996 and of civil cases in 1998. The NCSC project team also spoke with some of these individuals. In the County Court transition, SCA business analysts worked through all of the desks in the court and reviewed all business processes in preparation for the implementation. They identified a number of JUSTICE modifications that were required before the court could use the system. Most of these changes were made. Civil and criminal data conversions were done at different times in the County Court. This was probably a mistake. Also, data conversion tasks were divided between the state and DOT.Comm. This also resulted in some problems. The lessons learned were: 1) that the state would do the entire conversion, and 2) that civil and criminal cases would be migrated together. Another important lesson learned was that any temporary employees used to verify converted records should know the court business. Staffs hired to assist with the County Court conversion did not know what they were looking for and were not as effective as hoped. Some juvenile courts have made the transition to JUSTICE more recently than District and County Courts. Staff in these courts claims that they were promised some things that did not materialize. Dealing with supplemental petitions and getting the reports they needed were some of the more significant problems. Many of these issues have since been resolved. Implementation of electronic filing should be delayed until the district and juvenile courts are fully operational on JUSTICE, staff is comfortable with the new system, and all operational glitches have been resolved. Recommendations for a JUSTICE implementation plan will be divided into three phases, as shown below. It should be noted that the Agreement for Implementation of JUSTICE 23 contains kernels of the approach used by the state court administrator's office in implementing the system in other locations. While this document serves as an excellent outline, there are other issues that the 4 th District should consider. For purposes of discussion that follows, the three phases are: • Pre-implementation • Implementation • Post-implementation

23 See Appendix B: Agreement for Implementation of JUSTICE.

National Center for State Courts 53 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

A. Pre-Implementation Phase 1) Agreement between 4th District and State Court Administrator The first priority will be the development of the agreement with the state court administrator's office to define roles, responsibilities, and protocols. The Agreement for Implementation of JUSTICE contains a framework for discussion. The NCSC project team has identified additional issues that may be relevant to the agreement. First, the agreement suggests a number of specific questions that should be answered during pre- implementation discussions: • What equipment will the state provide? A placement map should show the location of each work area in the courthouse and adjoining facilities, and approximate location of printers, scanners, courtroom computers, and public access terminals. It is assumed that each employee will have a PC with which to work. • What equipment will be dedicated to the clerk/courts and what will be shared with other state agencies? This clause of the agreement likely was intended for smaller counties, but it would be good to have this point clarified in advance. • How many public access terminals will be provided and where will they be placed? • What JUSTICE enhancements and upgrades will be completed before the 4th District implementation, and what is the schedule for definition, development, testing, and release? • What is the schedule for training? What training classes are offered and which staff will attend which programs? • What is the plan for startup support—SCA staff and staff from other districts— how many people, what levels of expertise, and how long on site? • What is the startup plan? The delay of juvenile court implementation for a few months has been mentioned. Is it assumed that the District Court and clerk's office will all come up together? If there is any phasing, what will be the schedule for the various functions? • How many temporary staff and how much overtime is projected for the project, based on the experience of other districts? What is the reimbursement strategy mentioned in the agreement? • When will the SCA gap analysis between current procedures and the uniform operating procedures be conducted? • What is the plan for converting data? • What are the pre-installation instructions and tasks mentioned in the agreement, what is the schedule for their completion, and who will be responsible for each? • What are the security roles and how should they be allocated to staff? A table listing each staff person and their assigned security role should be developed to answer this question. • What are the estimated costs of consumable supplies, based on the experience of other districts?24

24 It i s reasonable to assume that the cost for consumable supplies for operations with JUSTICE will be similar to those experienced while using CJIS.

National Center for State Courts 54 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Second, other related issues should be on the table as policy leaders begin planning for JUSTICE implementation. • What project management methodology will be used? Who will be the key contacts? • What reporting protocols vill exist, both regular progress reporting and exception-based reporting? • How will risk management occur? • How will the 4 ' District be represented on the advisory committee and other groups responsible for the strategic and tactical direction of the JUSTICE system? A detailed, formal agreement between the state and the 4 th District will be of great benefit in managing expectations and ensuring smooth project execution. Estimated time to complete: 1 month 2) Business Process Changes The second major project of the pre-implementation phase should be the evaluation of business process changes recommended in this report and determination of: 1) which of these changes are desirable, 2) which can be completed before JUSTICE implementation, and 3) which changes must wait until the new system is installed. Once it is determined how the clerk and courts want to proceed with business process changes, teams of staff can get to work on implementation The NCSC project team suggests that the following business process changes as described elsewhere in this report, occur at this stage of the project: • Child and Spousal Support Validation Software • Monthly Credit Accounting • Document Scanning and Redaction

Estimated time to complete: 2 months 3) Organizational Changes As the clerk and court administrators review this report and their own experiences, they may determine that organizational changes are in order. Very often business process changes must be accompanied by organizational change to be effective. As individuals are cast in new roles, it is easier to adjust to new practices. There often is more resistance to change when it is not accompanied by altered roles and responsibilities. This also represents an opportunity to reward high performers with greater responsibilities. Organizational change is challenging. Emotional response to change often overwhelms intellectual understanding of the reasons. Individuals feel threatened. Panic and fear often express themselves. There are two keys to successful change management. The first is to involve staff in designing the new structure and procedures. As they feel ownership for change, they will be more supportive and work for its success. This is particularly important in working with unionized employees. As they feel a part of making the organization better, they will be more enthusiastic. The second key is communication. Everyone should know what is happening, how it will happen, and when it will happen. They should understand from the beginning that their

National Center for State Courts 55 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

views will be considered seriously. It is also important for staff to understand the business problems that managers are attempting to solve with the change. They may have creative insights into approaches that might not otherwise be considered. In the end, employees do not get to decide what work will be done and how it will be accomplished, but they should feel that they have had significant input. The NCSC project team suggests that all of the remaining organizational changes not addressed in the pre-implementation phase occur at this stage of the project. Estimated time to complete: 1 month 4) JUSTICE System Modifications The clerk and courts should enter negotiations with the SCA with a clear understanding of modifications to JUSTICE that are essential for its success in Douglas County. 25 Clearly there are important changes that must be made, many of which will be beneficial to other Nebraska courts. Taking the time to address these issues in a thorough, systematic way will be beneficial to everyone involved. If the list is not well defined and it changes as the implementation date approaches, everyone will be frustrated. It will be necessary to complete this agreement before an implementation schedule can be prepared. The implementation experience will reveal additional problems; no reasonable amount of planning can prevent this from occurring. The goal should be to minimize unanticipated glitches. The agreement between the state and the 4 th District should explicitly define what will and will not be done to JUSTICE before deployment in Douglas County. Where significant design work is required, the court should make staff available to assist. In addition, time and staff resources should be allocated to deal with significant unanticipated issues that arise during the implementation process. Estimated time to complete: 4 months The NCSC project team recommends that the following changes be made to JUSTICE before implementation: • The addition of the following writs and other documents: Order of Sale, Writ of Habeas Corpus, Writ of Mandamus, Writ of Attachment, Garnishment before Judgment, Writ of Assistance, Writ of Execution, Subpoena, Capias, Bill of Exceptions, Praecipe, Summons, Registration of Judgment, Registration of Foreign Judgment, Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction, Writ of Garnishment, Writ of Restitution, Writ of Assignment, and Notice of Support Lien • Judge assignment • Case Progression Notice • Calendaring • Conciliation Court • Journal reports • Improved relationship mapping • Credit card payments

25 The NCSC recommendations on this subject are contained in the business process analysis, integration analysis, and court policy environment sections of this report.

National Center for State Courts 56 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

5) DOT. Comm Decision and Negotiations It is important to make decisions early and to complete negotiations quickly to determine if and the extent to which DOT.Comm will be involved in the transition to JUSTICE and in the operational support of the system thereafter. If DOT.Comm is to be a partner, they should be involved all along the way, rather than being brought in after key decisions that affect them have already been made. Their staffing and resource levels will be influenced by the JUSTICE transition, and having time to plan will ensure that valuable employees will not be lost to the court system in the future. DOT.Comm has been a competent, trustworthy partner in the past and can be a valuable resource in the future; providing that mutually acceptable arrangements can be made. Estimated time to complete: 1 month 6) Design of System Interfaces This report has defined a number of necessary interfaces between JUSTICE and other applications in Douglas County. Other less urgent information sharing opportunities have been listed that also would be valuable to the justice community. The pre- implementation phase of planning should produce specific decisions about which interfaces will be implemented. A strategy for creating specifications and information sharing agreements also should be developed. The actual construction and implementation can occur during the implementation phase and should be a part of the startup plan. This process should include Douglas County, the SCA, and DOT.Comm. The NCSC project team recommends that the following system interfaces be included in the project: • Filing of criminal complaints and juvenile petitions • Tax foreclosure initiation

Estimated time to complete: 1 month 7) Startup Plan The pre-implementation phase should culminate in a startup plan that defines all of the work that must be performed, who is responsible, and when it must be completed. The startup plan should be based upon the Agreement previously mentioned, but should add significant detail as outlined in this section. Estimated time to complete: 2 weeks B. Implementation Phase The implementation phase of the plan is characterized as a well-choreographed set of activities that start at various times and are scheduled to conclude simultaneously with system implementation. The tricky part is scheduling staff to be involved in more than one of these activities without disrupting any of the others. Since these details must be negotiated with a number of organizations, it is not possible to provide more than a general view of how this will happen. 1) Gap Analysis The NCSC project team conducted a business process analysis comparing business practices in the county using CJIS with business processes in Lancaster County using JUSTICE. The baseline was Douglas County operations. As has been documented in

National Center for State Courts 57 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

this report, numerous issues exist and operations can be improved. Some of these issues relate to CJIS and others do not. The gap analysis that is being performed by the SCA takes a different perspective. It started with the operational procedures developed for JUSTICE and will determine where Douglas County operations differ. The findings should be very similar but it is likely that new issues will be discovered which will make the effort worthwhile. It is very difficult to modify business processes in the middle of a system implementation, thus conducting the gap analysis will be helpful. It also will serve to build knowledge in staff in the SCA' s office that will be helpful in supporting Douglas County in the future. Estimated time to complete: 2 months 2) Interface Development The process of developing interfaces between systems requires focused attention to detail. It also requires the involvement of individuals with in-depth expertise from the organizations sending and receiving information. Hopefully the information contained in this report provides sufficient definition of the interfaces, business context, and intended cargo. What remain to be accomplished are the development of the technical architecture for the exchanges and the negotiation of specific edits that will be applied to the information as it crosses organizational boundaries. Once these agreements are reached, the code must be written and the information exchanges tested and debugged. Estimated time to complete: 2 months 3) Data and Document Conversion Testing As documented in a previous section, the conversion of millions of document images cannot be accomplished overnight. Weeks of planning, testing, and converting will be required. The fortunate thing is that most of the optical platters contain fixed information that can be converted well in advance. Only the active platters will require last-minute attention. Database resources can be converted much more quickly but the quality of the data, consistency of code use, differences in data structure, and a number of other factors will make data conversion far more interesting. A great deal of testing and manual correction will be required. The testing must occur before implementation but most of the data cleanup will extend well past the implementation date. Estimated time to complete: 3 months 4) Installation, Configuration, and Testing Personal computers, printers, and scanners must be installed. This includes office suite applications, such as e-mail and word processing. The new AS/400 must be installed, have system and application software loaded, and be configured to support the 4 th District Court. Network equipment must be installed and configured. System users must be set up and code tables established. All of this should be completed as the first users complete their training. Estimated time to complete: 2 months

National Center for State Courts 58 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

5) Report and Document Template Development Certain reports and document templates must be set up for Douglas County. Some of this likely will be taken care of during system configuration such as setting up names, addresses, etc., in tables. Other specific changes to report and document production programs may be required. Estimated time to complete: 1 month 6) Training Each system user must receive training in performing the system functions that will be required of him or her. The state has had plenty of experience in so doing. Estimated time to complete: 2 months 7) Business Process and Organizational Change Certain business process and organizational changes will not be possible with the old CJIS system. Implementation of these changes must be concurrent with JUSTICE installation. While there will be ample time to plan and prepare, the actual modifications must come in the heat of a system installation. With the transition to JUSTICE, the 4 th District Court should open a new bank account and deposit all funds received into that new account. Over time, money from the old account will be paid out or transferred to the new account. Estimated time to complete: 2 weeks 8) Data and Document Conversion At the very last moment, the data and documents must be brought from CJIS and Content Manager into JUSTICE. No amount of testing and preparation can make this process easy. There must be a specific cutoff time for CJIS data entry, and from that time forward everything must be in JUSTICE. This may occur from a Friday night to a Monday morning. It would be wise to schedule a light week of court activity so the start up date must be set months in advance. It should be noted that it will require approximately 11 weeks pulling all court documents from the Douglas County content manager. Estimated time to complete: 3 months 9) Start Up Start up refers to the actual cutover from the old system to the new. On the start up date, JUSTICE will be up and running and staff will be learning to work as quickly and effectively as they did with CJIS, EDS, and Content Manager. This will take time. The hard part of change is that it takes days and weeks to progress from thinking about every click and keystroke, to performing functions without even thinking about it. Regardless of the quality of the system, the transition will be painful. In a matter of months, however, staff will be as comfortable with the new system as they were with the old and will not want to go back. 10)Interface Implementation It is not possible to transmit information from a system that has no data. Once JUSTICE is up and running in Douglas County, the need to exchange information will be

National Center for State Courts 59 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

immediate. All the months of planning will pay off as a great deal of human effort once required with CJIS will be eliminated with JUSTICE. The following chart illustrates the basic task dependencies of the implementation phase of the implementation plan. Because of the length of text in some of the boxes, it is not possible to provide a precise depiction of the relative length of the tasks.

I Business Process and Gap Analysis I Organizational Change

Data and Document Conversion Testing Conversion

Installation, Configuration, Training Start Up and Testing

Interface Interface Development Implementation

Report and Document I Template Development

JUSTICE Implementation Phase C. Post-Implementation Phase During the post-implementation phase there will be a tremendous amount of data cleanup that must be accomplished to compensate for incompatibilities between the two databases. This work will be tedious but will help staff get accustomed to working in the new environment and teach the importance of quality data input. In addition, unanticipated problems with the system and with business processes may appear. It is important to retain some time and resources to correct any serious issues as quickly as possible. Ongoing attention should be paid to staff training and data quality monitoring to ensure that JUSTICE continues to be a powerful tool in assisting with the work of the courts. Estimated time to complete: 1 month D. Costs The majority of the costs for the transition from CJIS to JUSTICE will be born by the state. These costs include the following items: • Business analysis and programming costs for data and document conversion, system modifications required by the 4 th District, startup, and operations estimated by the state to be $300,000 • Training programs, business process review, and documentation for the new system

National Center for State Courts 60 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

• Equipment, including servers, networking equipment and software, personal computers, printers, office automation software, and infrastructure support estimated by the state to be $105,000 • Technical assistance and application support • Development of interfaces between CJIS and JUSTICE as previously identified, including criminal and juvenile case initiation, and tax foreclosure initiation 26

Costs that may not be fully paid by the state include extra monitors at individual workstations and scanners. The district and juvenile courts and clerk's office already have a number of monitors and scanners that might cover the need completely but if additional equipment is needed, the costs will break down as follows: • LCD monitors (19 or 20 inch) should cost roughly $200 each. If it were necessary to purchase monitors for every personal computer (which it should not be), the total cost would be approximately $40,000 • Scanners should cost about $3,000 for high-speed scanners with large sheet feeders. Lower-end scanners with sheet feeders (appropriate for individual workstations) run about $500 each. Total cost to provide ten new personal scanners would be $5,000. Three high-capacity shared scanners would total $9,000

Assuming that the cost of outfitting each employee with all of the necessary personal computer, printer, scanner hardware, and software (amortized over a three-year warranty period) is approximately $1,065 per user per year, 27 the county will save roughly $198,090 dollars per year by having the state assume responsibility for technology in the court and clerk operations. This is offset by a first-year, one-time cost of approximately $49,000. If the state chooses to contract with DOT.Comm for support of Douglas County, these expenses will reappear but the state will pay them under the contract. In any event, the county will save a great deal of money by having the state assume this responsibility. There are non-monetary costs associated with the transition. Staff of the district court, juvenile court, and clerk of court will spend a considerable amount of time working with state officials in preparing for the transition, training, and adjusting to new procedures and a new system. This will lower productivity and increase stress for approximately six to nine months. In addition, the clerk should dedicate one full-time person for approximately two months to work with the SCA business analyst to identify and clean up CJIS data problems before any data conversion is undertaken. It is also recommended that two staff positions be reserved to deal with information verification and data quality issues during the first month of JUSTICE operation.

26 The other candidate exchanges listed in section VIII either already exist in JUSTICE, are not desired by the courts, or have not yet been developed. 27 The estimate from DOT.Comm includes $475 per user per year for a PC and monitor, $100 for the Microsoft Office Suite, $200 for printers and scanners, $100 for PC/network support, and $180 for other miscellaneous costs.

National Center for State Courts 61 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

In addition, the cooperation of DOT.Comm will be required to complete development of new information exchanges. E. Timeline The project timeline must be worked out in an agreement with SCA staff. This timeline is an estimate by the NCSC project team of what could reasonably be done. - It is based on the tasks outlined in this section.

National Center for State Courts 62 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

D ask Name 2009 Jul Au ' S_ Oct Nov Dec San 1 Feb illEMI, Aar !IIIMIVIIEMINEM re-imptementation WO 2 Agreement 1;;;Z7 3 musiness process changes 1 1 4 Orgartka onal changes 5 JUSTICE modifications - 6 DOT.Comrn agreement 7 Design interfaces Startup plan 9 mplementation _ 10 Gap analysis _ _ 11 Business process changes 12 Organkaticnal changes

13 Conversion testing ; 1 14 Data and document conversion 15 Insta3ation, configuration, and testing 1 16 Training I 17 Interface development 11 18 Interface implementation 41, 711 19 Report and document development = 413 Start Up • 711 21 ost Implementation tip======::i=;t 22 Oata cleanup 1 23 System issues

Estimated Project Timeline

National Center for State Courts 63 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

XII. PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND QUALITY ASSURANCE This will be a large and complex conversion process for the state and Douglas County. There is much work to be done and timeframes will be tight. It is essential that sound project management practices be used at all stages of the project. The 4 th District should designate a full-time manager for the duration of the project, who will work with the project manager at the SCA to ensure that no steps are missed and that plans are adjusted to compensate for the inevitable problems that will arise. A work breakdown structure showing all of the tasks and subtasks should be created. A project schedule should show dependencies between tasks, responsibility for assignments, and anticipated resource allocation and completion dates. These project documents should be updated for each reporting period. Periodic reporting processes, along with methods for dealing with problems, should be implemented. Regular communication between the district and juvenile courts, the SCA, and DOT.Comm if they are involved, should be instituted. It is assumed that work with the state CIO will be managed by the SCA, but there likely will be some connection between them and Douglas County officials. Risk management also should be conducted. This involves determining potential failure points, their probably of occurring, the impact if they do occur, and mitigation strategies. This will be a responsibility of project managers, in conjunction with organizational leaders.

National Center for State Courts 64 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

XIII. SUMMARY th The transition to JUSTICE is an exciting opportunity for the 4 District. While the system is not based on the latest and greatest technology, it does represent a giant leap forward in terms of supporting business processes in Douglas County. When coupled with business process and organizational improvement§, it will provide more efficient and effective operations, better customer service, and a higher level of justice for the citizens of the district. A great deal of work and adjustment lies ahead for the judges, clerks, administrators, and other staff With patience and perseverance, a better judicial organization will result. The National Center for States appreciates the opportunity it has had to assist in a small way in this tremendous project, and offers its thanks to the many cooperative and helpful staff that made the experience educational and enjoyable.

National Center for State Courts 65 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

APPENDIX A: EQUIPMENT LIST

(Information provided by DOT. Comm.)

District Court: Personal computers 85 Laptop computers 17 Network printers 6 Local printers 77

Juvenile Court: Personal computers 29 Printers 19

Clerk of District Court: Personal computers 72 Local printers 35 Network printers 18

Other Devices: Scanners 11 Network copiers 5

National Center for State Courts 66 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

APPENDIX B: AGREEMENT FOR INSTALLATION OF JUSTICE

(Extracted from draft agreement supplied by the SCA.)

IV. OBLIGATIONS OF THE STATE COURT ADMINISTRATOR 1. Provide one personal computer or thin client for each court employee using JUSTICE directly supervised by the Clerk. If other AS/400 equipment is already in the office, SCA will share the cost with other state agencies. Requests for public terminals will be considered separately.

2. Provide one printer for each three terminals. A laser printer may be substituted for two or more dot matrix printers at the discretion of the State Court Administrator.

3. Pay for the use of the computer to operate JUSTICE, including central processor, disk storage, and communication charges, as authorized by Nebraska law.

4. Maintain and upgrade JUSTICE to correct operational problems, accommodate changes in Nebraska law and court rules, or to improve the usability or usefulness of the system. Changes will be prioritized by the Court Administrator, with counsel from the Advisory Committee; requests for enhancements will usually be considered by the Advisory Committee. Changes will be prioritized and completed as resources are available. Completed changes are released in groups to allow thorough testing, training, preparation, and notification to clerks.

5. Provide JUSTICE training for the Clerk and members of the court office staff in Omaha, Nebraska.

6. Assist and train in the transition to the automated system by presenting training and having JUSTICE staff in the Clerk's office during installation.

7. Maintain a Help Desk which the Clerk or designated staff members will call for assistance. If needed, a JUSTICE staff member may be assigned to visit the court to resolve problems.

8. Provide supplemental training to explain the use of new or advanced features.

V. OBLIGATIONS OF THE CLERK 1. Supervise current court staff and hire and supervise any temporary staff which will be available to assist with the installation of JUSTICE.

2. Institute new office procedures or modify current procedures as needed to follow the recommendations of the JUSTICE staff to assure the smooth implementation and operation of the system.

3. Adhere to uniform procedures promulgated by the SCA in procedures manuals, training system help, or by JUSTICE Help Desk staff.

National Center for State Courts 67 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

4. Attend training and require that all employees who will use JUSTICE also attend training. Clerk must make other arrangements with SCA if it is impossible for a staff member to attend a class.

5. Confer with judges of the court, prosecutors, county , board and other agencies which the Clerk believes should be included to decide issues important to the successful implementation of JUSTICE. Examples include:

a. Deciding which cases will be entered in JUSTICE. b. Deciding which cases should be dismissed or otherwise closed. c. Reviewing procedures to determine if changes are necessary to make the office run more effectively.

6. Be responsible for the accuracy of all information entered in JUSTICE.

7. Allow SCA staff access to books, records, reports, etc. to verify that the implementation plan is sound, that financial records are in balance, and that the correct cases have been entered. SCA staff may spot check records to assure accuracy.

8. Follow the pre-installation instructions and complete all pre-installation tasks provided by the JUSTICE team.

9. Arrange for employees to work additional hours during installation, or arrange for acquiring temporary employees for the installation process. The Clerk will be advised separately of reimbursement status and procedures.

10. Call the JUSTICE Help Desk to:

a. Report problems with equipment or the JUSTICE program b. Request assistance before performing unfamiliar functions c. Suggest changes or enhancements to JUSTICE d. Request equipment changes or moves

11. Document problems as directed by the Help Desk to assist programmers in finding the cause of the problem.

12. Check in regularly with SCA personnel to report progress, including problems in dealing with the system.

13. The Clerk of the District Court will pay for all consumable supplies used in the course of the operation of the computer system. At the time of this agreement this includes electricity, paper, labels, ribbons, and ink or toner cartridges for printers. Future enhancements to the system could require different supplies.

National Center for State Courts 68 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

VI. ACCESS TO INFORMATION 1. Court information is protected by the security of the AS/400 computer system. Information can be entered and changed only by authorized court staff.

2. Most court information is available from the system through public access identifiers. People using a public access ID may look at the information but may not change it.

3. The Supreme Court, through the State Court Administrator, will make local court information available through a statewide public access system. Information is also available through Nebraska. gov.

4. The Supreme Court, through the SCA, may view, copy, summarize or report on court information at any time, but may not change it.

5. JUSTICE automatically updates other computers when certain events occur. In child support, the Health and Human Services System, CHARTS, will automatically be notified when a new case is established, a payment or distribution is made, or when many other changes are made. The Department of Motor Vehicles receives abstracts, amended abstracts, notices of failure to appear or comply, etc. Criminal history and Protection order information is being sent to the Nebraska State Patrol. This capability will be expanded in the future.

6. When an error occurs, JUSTICE Help Desk staff will work with the court users to locate the problem. Sometimes a programmer must change data in the clerk's computer system. The court will be notified and the data changed by one of the few trusted programmers with this authority.

VII. General Explanation Implementing JUSTICE in a court clerk's office is a significant task which requires the leadership, enthusiasm and time of the clerk. It also requires the cooperation of judges, prosecutors and attorneys to reschedule activities.

Employees in training cannot do their daily work. After training, some pending cases must be entered in the computer while keeping up with new filings.

Implementation will begin as soon as possible after training. This lets staff members begin to use the system while the lessons are still fresh in their minds, but leaves little time to catch up with work that piled up during training.

Courts which perform all case processing steps will find JUSTICE helps tame the workload. The work of court clerks will be standardized and court records will be more uniform. Information will be available to everyone who uses the system. Reports prepared for the clerk's use can assure cases are resolved promptly and help clerks improve service.

National Center for State Courts 69 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

APPENDIX C: JUSTICE INFORMATION EXCHANGE MODEL (MEM) DOCUMENTATION

Pre-disposition Court — Stage in the Court Process for All Exchanges

Exchange #1: Prosecutor Adult Charging Decision

Narrative of Exchange: Prosecutor Adult Charging Decision for Felony or Indictable Misdemeanor During the Pre-disposition Court process, at the Prosecutor Adult Charging Decision event, if prosecutor finds sufficient evidence to file charges, and if charge is a felony or indictable misdemeanor, and if defendant waives preliminary hearing, the County Attorney sends the Criminal Direct File Information to the District Court for the Open District Court Case event in the Pre-disposition Court process.

Document: Criminal Direct File Information

Data Elements in Document: Court for filing Person Criminal Case Address Data Number Name DOB Sex DL number Arrest number Incident Date Charge Date Charge Statute code Statute code Witness Address Name Phone number Attorney name Attorney title

National Center for State Courts 70 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Exchange #2: Prosecutor Juvenile Petition Decision

Narrative of Exchange: Prosecutor Juvenile Delinquency Petition Decision During the Pre-disposition Court process, at the Prosecutor Juvenile Petition Decision event, if prosecutor find sufficient evidence to file a juvenile petition, and if charge is a misdemeanor or felony, the County Attorney sends the Juvenile Delinquency Petition to the Juvenile Court for the Open Juvenile Court Case event in the Pre-disposition Court process.

Document: Juvenile Delinquency Petition

Data Elements in Document: Court for filing Person Juvenile Case Address DOB Data Number Name Sex Arrest number Incident Date Charge Date Charge Statute code Statute code Witness Address Name Phone number Attorney name Attorney title

Exchange #3: County Attorney Tax Foreclosure Initiation

Narrative of Exchange: Tax Foreclosure Filing During the Pre-disposition Court process, at the County Attorney Tax Foreclosure Initiation event, if tract was not purchased at tax sale, the County Attorney sends the Tax Foreclosure Petition to the District Court for the Open District Court Case event in the Pre-disposition Court process.

Document: Tax Foreclosure Petition

National Center for State Courts 71 Case Management System Migration for the 4th Judicial District of Nebraska Final Report

Data Elements in Document: Court for filing Person Civil Case Name Address Tract description Attorney name Attorney title Summary of Data Elements in All Exchanges — Data Structure Re Dort Data Element Child Elements Address Arrest number Attorney name Attorney title Charge Statute code Charge Date Court for filing Data Number DL number DOB Incident Date Name Person Civil Case Name Address Person Criminal Case Address Data Number Name DOB Sex DL number Arrest number Person Juvenile Case Address DOB Data Number Name Sex Arrest number Phone number Sex Statute code Tract description Witness Address Name Phone number

National Center for State Courts 72 OFFICES OF THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR STATE COURTS

WILLIAMSBURG, VA 300 Newport Avenue Williamsburg, VA 23185-4147

DENVER, CO 707 Seventeenth Street, Suite 2900 Denver, CO 80202-3429

ARLINGTON, VA 2425 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 350 Arlington, VA 22201-3326

Association Services - (800)616-6165 Consulting - (800) 466-3063 Education - ICM - (800) 616-6206 Government Relations - (800) 532-0204 Information - (800) 616-6164 International - (800) 797-2545 Publications - (888) 228-6272 Research - (800) 616-6109 Technology - (888) 846-6746