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Butler County Prosecutor’s Office
Hamilton, Ohio

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"The amount of available information about individuals, case participants, and events far exceeds the capabilities of our previous system. With JustWare, we are tracking more information and making it available to more people in a variety of ways. Information, which was pretty well locked up in our old system, is now available for document automation, management reports, and communications with the public. The significant differences between criminal and civil divisions makes it difficult to use a single software solution for both. However, we found that JustWare provided a substantial amount of flexibility, which enabled us to ultimately meet the needs of both divisions."
Roger Gates
Civil Division Chief

October 14, 2008

The flexibility of JustWare | Prosecutor allowed Butler County to purchase one case management system for its criminal and civil divisions. Butler County Prosecutor’s Office was evaluating software for both the felony criminal division and the delinquent tax and collections (DTAC) unit.

Challenge

Butler County Prosecutor’s Office utilized COPS3, a software application developed by Text and Data Technologies in cooperation with the Ohio Prosecuting Attorney’s Association. Due to the increasing needs of the office to track and use information to prosecute cases and a lack of support from their vendor to meet those needs, Butler County Prosecutor’s Office began evaluating software for both the felony criminal division and the delinquent tax and collections (DTAC) unit.

The Butler County Prosecutor’s Office receives its felony criminal cases from six lower courts, rather than directly from local law enforcement agencies. Much of the information is tracked at the count level to make reporting back to the lower courts easier. The State of Ohio requires all felony charges to appear before a grand jury. Because the grand jury decision is not the final disposition of a case, the Prosecutor’s Office needed a way to track interim dispositions. Butler had two main goals for their new system: customizable reporting capabilities and document automation.

Solution

JustWare was selected after several online and onsite demonstrations and a site visit to one of New Dawn’s featured customers and then implementation began. JustWare was enhanced to show all dispositions in the felony count history. Now, the history of each count contains all disposition information from the grand jury to the trial jury.

The flexibility of JustWare allows it to be used for many different, sometimes exceptional, applications. Butler County uses JustWare in both its criminal and civil divisions. “The things we do in the civil process with a system designed for criminal prosecution are pretty remarkable," said Roger Gates, Division Chief for Butler County Prosecuting Attorney's Office. "The significant differences between criminal and civil make it difficult to use a single software solution for both divisions. However, we found that JustWare provided a substantial amount of flexibility, which enabled us to ultimately meet the needs of both divisions.”

JustWare’s EventEngine plays an important role in both the criminal and civil divisions. Many previously manual tasks have been automated. The EventEngine is organized to automatically produce documents, add events or change an event status when a master event occurs. The automatic events are chained together allowing a series of events to occur consecutively.

Butler County’s DTAC unit customized the count navigation area to track claims by people who might claim an interest in real property that was the subject of a foreclosure action. This unit effectively expanded their use of JustWare to track requests and replies to requests for advice from county officials.

“[Another] big thing,” Gates continues, “was Justware's ability to work with an image management system (IMS) we acquired which is allowing us to significantly reduce our stored paper but still make the documents readily available from Justware.” Gates explains that images are stored in the IMS and are accessed by a “one-click link” from the appropriate file in JustWare. Butler County officials can now retrieve and handle case-specific images quickly and easily as the agency moves closer its goal of a paperless working environment.

Result

“The amount of available information about individuals, case participants and events far exceeds the capabilities of our previous system. We are tracking more information and making it available to more people in a variety of ways,” said Gates. “Information, which was pretty well locked up in our old system, is now available for document automation, managing reports, and communicating with the public.”

Butler County Prosecutor’s Office also uses JusticeWebview to provide secure, web access to data stored within JustWare. “On the civil side, we have gotten very positive feedback concerning Webview reports from our County Treasurer’s office,” Gates reports. Prosecutors use reports generated from JusticeWebview to fulfill requests from other stakeholders regarding the disposition of cases involving those agencies. Outside agencies can also use the JusticeWebview module to generate reports showing their pending events.

“Our office staff loves Justware for the document automation, the ease of access to information, the thoroughness of information,” Gates said of Butler County’s overall impression of JustWare, “we have made converts out of a few very skeptical individuals.”

 


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