Franklin County Superior Court, Clerk’s Office get new case management system

When Superior Court Judge Alex Ekstrom walked into a Franklin County courtroom earlier this month, the paper files on his bench were joined by a large computer linked to scanned copies of each case.

“Good morning to you all. Welcome to the future,” Ekstrom said, taking a seat behind the touchscreen monitor.

As Ekstrom worked his way through the criminal docket, a trainer seated next to the judge helped him electronically enter future court dates on certain cases. Paperwork handed up by a prosecutor or defense attorney still went into the defendant’s paper file.

That first day wasn’t without its technical problems for Ekstrom and the deputy clerk, but court officials say the much-needed upgrade was welcomed — headaches and all.

The Franklin County Clerk’s Office went live at the start of November with a new electronic case and document management system called Odyssey.

The long-awaited system integrates three court functions: indexing, calendaring and document filing. That means it keeps track of all hearings, the actions taken in court and the scanned documents and links them all to the event, or a particular case.

It replaces the Superior Court Management Information System, or SCOMIS, which first rolled out in 1977 and had been used in Franklin County since 1983.

Franklin County Clerk Mike Killian said SCOMIS took the place of old ledger books and quill pens, so it is time for the court to technologically evolve to modern case management.

The ultimate goal is to be a paperless court, said Killian, though it may take up to two years to get a separate electronic filing system.

“We really are excited about the system and how it can work,” he told the Herald. “It will be nice to have everything integrated into one system.”

Killian admitted there will be road bumps, but as an “early adopter” his office is helping work out the bugs and tailor the product before it is implemented statewide.

The state Administrative Office of the Courts has made several unsuccessful attempts over the years to find a replacement for the antiquated SCOMIS. The funds for Odyssey’s implementation were appropriated by the state Legislature, with counties left to cover costs for hardware like new computer equipment and scanners.

The pilot site was Lewis County Superior Court and the county Clerk’s Office, where Odyssey first went live in June. Franklin County was joined this month by Thurston and Yakima counties as early adopters.

Eventually all Washington counties — except for King and Pierce — will use the system by May 2018. Benton County is scheduled to be one of 12 counties in the final group.

The Benton-Franklin Superior Court is a bicounty judicial district with separate county clerk’s offices. So the seven judges, court administration and Juvenile Court officials must be trained on the new system and have access to it from their computers in their Kennewick offices, even if they can only access files generated in the Franklin County Courthouse in Pasco.

Superior Court Judge Bruce Spanner got involved with the project in August 2012 when he was appointed to the state’s procurement team, he said. He helped evaluate two separate products and viewed their demonstrations before the contract was awarded to Odyssey’s manufacturer, Texas-based Tyler Technologies.

Spanner then was appointed to the Court User Work Group, which made sure Tyler’s product could meet the business practices of Washington’s superior courts and identified necessary modifications.

“This project is a huge step forward. It’s more than just replacing an application, it’s combining multiple functions,” Spanner said. “Right now SCOMIS keeps court data, and that’s all it can do. Odyssey does that in spades, plus it has the calendaring, plus all the reports can be generated from Odyssey.”

The new system is going to “change the way we do business in court,” Spanner said.

If a criminal defendant doesn’t show up for court, the judge can issue a warrant with a few keystrokes and have it automatically transmitted to the jail, instead of waiting for a clerk to make paper copies after the hearing, he said.

The three Franklin County Superior Court courtrooms have been outfitted with a touchscreen monitor on the bench, along with each judge’s chambers.

Each night before court, a tablet will be connected to a hard drive in the server room so the docket and images can be uploaded for the judge to view in advance in chambers and in real time on the bench. This is what eventually will allow paper files to become obsolete.

“I am so proud of the Franklin County Clerk’s Office and their staff. Change is hard for some people, but they have embraced it and embraced it with great enthusiasm,” Spanner said.

“I really think that for everyone involved in the court system right now, that the implementation of Odyssey will be a legacy from our careers.”

Benton County Clerk Josie Delvin decided against being an early adopter of Odyssey after taking several staff members to Spokane in summer 2014 for an early viewing of the product, she said.

They all returned with similar concerns, so Delvin opted to stick with SCOMIS and Liberty, a third-party document management system, for the next 2 1/2 years. Liberty is a “robust management system” for scanning and preserving documents, and she is waiting to see if Tyler Technologies will create a bridge so the Odyssey and Liberty systems can talk, she said.

“I have concerns about Odyssey itself replacing SCOMIS because I did research on Tyler Technologies on the Internet and found some issues in states that they have implemented,” Delvin said.

The four counties that so far have implemented Odyssey have gone all in using the system for case management and scanning purposes. Delvin wants to see “how everything else shakes out” and if Odyssey actually makes it into other courts across the state in the coming years.

Delvin said her job as the elected clerk is to protect court records, and she could not in good faith switch over to the new system at this time.

“First of all, my documents are on a server in the county, whereas if I go to Tyler it will be on an (Administrative Office of the Courts) server,” she said. “The AOC has been hacked before and information has been obtained, so I don’t feel confident that they’re secure on a server in Olympia. I feel more confident that (the documents) are here.”

Delvin also said Liberty allows the clerks to scan noncase-related items and is auditable, with scanned documents automatically placed into folders.

The Franklin County Clerk’s Office used a different legacy system called ApplicationXtender.

A week before switching everything over to Odyssey, the office stopped scanning all documents into the imaging system. The county’s Information Services department then downloaded all of the Clerk’s Offices images — more than 7 million — onto a hard drive. That took about nine hours, Killian said.

The hard drive then was driven to Olympia, where the Tyler and AOC team extracted the images and uploaded them into Odyssey and linked the data.

Clerk’s Office employees came in on a Sunday to scan all of the case files that had accrued over the previous week and add them to the system before it went live the following day. The project covered their overtime costs, Killian said.

This story was originally published November 21, 2015 at 10:04 PM with the headline "Franklin County Superior Court, Clerk’s Office get new case management system."