[T]he Defender General’s Office is using a new case management system that could change the way Vermont’s public defenders handle thousands of cases.
The cloud-based system is a one-stop shop for Vermont’s public defenders that gives them access to the latest information about particular cases and histories of defendants.
Attorneys and others in the Defender General’s offices across the state went online with the new system Monday.
“We came in on time and under budget,” Defender General Matt Valerio said Monday.
The project came in below the $500,000 price tag, and took about 18 months to get up and running — including migrating data from some 140,000 cases to the new system. The leftover money will go toward maintenance and updates for the program over the next several years.
The system replaces a two-decade-old electronic management system that was built in-house by one of the attorneys on staff. Each of Vermont’s seven public defender offices had an independent system, which could only be used by one person at a time.
The office opted for an off-the-shelf program that has been tried and tested by other legal defense offices. The program, JustWare Defender, is in use in some 400 offices around the country. Vermont’s Defender General’s Office sought reviews from many of the program’s current users, including the state of Montana.
Valerio said the program will change the way attorneys with his office do business. Instead of lugging paper files around, they can walk into the courtroom carrying a tablet, he said.
“The attorneys are going to have more info at their fingertips than they ever had under any system previously,” Valerio said.
Attorneys’ notes, for example, will follow a case when it is transferred to another attorney. If someone has already been in the system and has a history of mental illness or substance abuse, their defense attorney will have that information earlier in the process.
On a macro level, Valerio said, it will also help with data and statistics in the judiciary system as a whole.
Vermont’s Defender General’s Office is involved with 84 percent of the criminal cases that go through Vermont’s court system each year, according to Valerio. All told, public defenders handle 22,000 cases a year across the state.
Vermont’s prosecutors are on track to come online with a similar system in June, David Cahill, executive director of the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs said Tuesday.
The state’s attorneys went with the same vendor as the Defender General’s Office, but are using a product that is geared toward prosecutors. He said it will help the state better track data — such as how much time prosecutors spend on different types of cases, case outcomes and recidivism.
“What the case management system will do will be to give us quantifiable data,” Cahill said. “To a certain extent, it will tell us how effective criminal court case outcomes are.”
Cahill said the IT systems for prosecutors and public defenders are just one part of the puzzle.
“We’re only going to extract the maximum value from these systems if everyone in the criminal justice system makes these leaps forward and does that at approximately the same time,” Cahill said, noting that the systems rely on Internet access in courthouses and advances in the courts’ IT systems.
The judiciary is in the early stages of creating an IT system that they hope will interface with between 25 and 30 different frequent partners, Court Administrator Patricia Gabel said Tuesday.
Lawmakers earmarked money in the capital bill this year to fund the project. Gabel said that the next steps will be hiring a project manager and then putting out a request for proposals.
