Kate:                     Welcome to the Paperless Productivity Podcast where we give you the tips, tricks and know-how to solve your biggest workflow challenges and bring greater productivity into your workplace every day.

Welcome to this week’s episode and if you’re in the court space, then this episode is for you. So many courts are trying to find ways to be more efficient without ripping out all of their old systems. Trying to find technology that’s going to work for them, to help them to manage their caseload and to address the changing needs of today’s modern courts, but without having to go through a major strategy and major technology overhaul.

So today, we’re going to be talking about the component model and the National Center for State Courts and Community Live and how all of these things are all converging together. Kevin Ledgister of ImageSoft is going to be talking and taking us through this today. We will explore this in today’s episode.

Kevin L:                 All right, thank you very much Kate. First of all, let me just start off by just explaining a little bit about what the component model is that’s being promoted by the National Center for State Courts. If you’re a court listener, you may be familiar with this. You most certainly have heard about this. Maybe you were at the National Associates for Court Manager’s show or any one of the shows where you may have heard one of these things mentioned in the seminar.

The component model really came out of this whole idea in terms of just naturally seeing where courts were heading. It used to be in the olden days … Why’d I say the olden days? Really, we’re only talking a few years ago.

Kate:                     Right!

Kevin L:                 But in technology, olden days is like what happened last year.

Kate:                     Last year, yeah.

Kevin L:                 So with respect to that, it used to be that the recommendation was buy your solution from a technology vendor that can provide you the entire stack of your technology needs. So it would be a vendor that could provide you with your case management, could provide you with e-filing, could provide you with your judge interface, your e-bench solution so you would have everything right within that one package.

Well, the reality is that as courts progress and courts buy onto this, first of all they found it would be very, very expensive to do this. As a result, what happened is that a lot of courts that couldn’t afford the $1 million, $2 million or $5 million, whatever it would cost to essentially rip out their entire core of their technology to replace it with another vendor’s offering, what happened was that those courts just got stuck in time and they weren’t able to move forward in terms of implementing new features. And maybe, their case manager solution did everything they needed it to do except for one small piece of functionality that they needed. Or maybe they just needed to integrate e-filing with it so that people could electronically file. Or maybe they just needed to handle their documents through Microsoft Word and doing Word templates much more efficiently and being able to update them as opposed to programmatically going in and changing those.

So, it was just these small bits of functionality that a lot of times the courts were looking for and they couldn’t get to without ripping out the whole entire infrastructure and changing it for something new. The National Center for State Courts really looked at this and came along and updated their thought process in terms of, well instead of just trying to rip everything out and tear it all out, really what we should be promoting is this idea of being able to have interoperability between applications. So with respect to that, a court could say,