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City of Long Beach Prosecutor's Office
Long Beach, California

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"Our own local courthouse will call our staff to ask what’s on the calendar today because they don’t believe their system is as accurate as ours. So that’s a round of high fives and applause for JustWare and my staff."
Thomas Reeves
City Prosecutor

April 19, 2007

The City of Long Beach Prosecutor’s Office is one of the larger city prosecutor’s offices in the state of California, employing 42 personnel who process 25-30,000 adult misdemeanors cases per year.

Challenge

The Long Beach City Prosecutor’s Office was previously utilizing an internally developed, COBOL-based, legacy application before selecting and implementing JustWare. The system, according to Thomas Reeves, the City Prosecutor, was "wholly inadequate for any modern office."

The City of Long Beach Prosecutor’s Office began seriously looking for an automated case management solution in 1999, soon after Thomas P. Reeves was elected City Prosecutor. Reeves recognized the office’s need for a system that would capture more data. Data that could be extracted in custom reports would help him better understand the internal workings of his office. Reeves wanted to be able to "look and see what offenses were occurring that we were prosecuting more of, and rejections we were giving and why, so I could reach out to the police department and tell them the problems that we were having with the way they were, perhaps, making an arrest or writing a report. I also wanted to look to see if I was having a lot of dismissals of certain cases or certain counts by certain prosecutors, I had the means to reach out and see what was going on in that area."

The prosecutor’s office compared many systems during an exhaustive two-year search. In addition to powerful report-writing capabilities, the office wanted a system that would be efficient for both attorneys and support staff. They wanted a system that was made specifically for prosecutors, was relatively easy to understand and install, and was easy to use.

Solution

The City of Long Beach Prosecutor’s Office selected JustWare | Prosecutor in November of 2000 and began actively using JustWare in December of the next year.

Once the transition to JustWare from their legacy application was complete, the staff began to recognize the positive changes. Denise Albertson, the Support Staff Manager, says "In the beginning, JustWare takes a little more time, because you’re entering all the information, but in the long run it saves a lot of time" because you don’t have to enter the same people over and over again. The prosecutor’s office uses JustWare tracks all pertinent name and case information associated with individuals who are being prosecuted or defended. This information includes court events, victim notification, and dispositions.

JustWare has provided the report-writing capabilities that are imperative for the office. Jean Hommes, the office’s JustWare administrator, is responsible for writing whatever reports are needed. The Office Manager and the City Prosecutor request a constant stream of new reports. These reports both fulfill government requirements and gather a variety of internal statistics. Hommes says that with the help of New Dawn’s excellent tech support she has been able to create every report that has been requested.

Result

"Our own local courthouse will call our staff to ask what’s on the calendar today because they don’t believe their system is as accurate as ours. So that’s a round of high fives and applause for JustWare and my staff." –Thomas Reeves, City Prosecutor

"Our case load has gone up since 2000, the sophistication of our cases has gone up, and JustWare has adapted to that as well as helped us build on our capacity to use our filing system in maximum efficiency." –Thomas Reeves, City Prosecutor

"When I go into the old system to access old cases, it blows my mind how we ever survived on that—how we ever got information from it—because it was so minimal. JustWare is definitely an improvement for our office, especially since our caseload has increased so much over the years." –Denise Albertson, Support Staff Manager

"Tech support has been fantastic for us. I’ve been happy with [JustWare]. I have no complaints." –Jean Hommes, JustWare Administrator

"Now that they’ve been using [JustWare] for several years, they like it very much and they rely on it completely." –Carina Lister, IT Staff

Ongoing Goals

The City of Long Beach Prosecutor’s Office accepts arrest information from their local law enforcement agency. This data is then manually entered into JustWare. The prosecutor’s office plans to implement an automated data exchange, by which the arrest information would be automatically input into JustWare without duplicate data entry by both organizations.

The City Prosecutor and the JustWare administrator are both looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of JustWare | Prosecutor, which offers user or group-specific data entry and access screens, a customized My JustWare dashboard that provides real time reporting and calendaring and a web style searching. This version of JustWare | Prosecutor can be easily deployed on laptops using ClickOnce deployment. This functionality will allow Long Beach prosecutors to access JustWare on laptops in the courtroom.


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