Kate Storey:                       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. If you work in the justice community, the term paperless is likely to fill you with one of two emotions, relief because you realize the freedom and efficiency that you will experience as a result, or dread because it means things are about to change. If that second emotion is more relatable, it’s okay. You’re not alone.

But as our world becomes ever more connected, it’s time to take a good look at what it’s really like to digitize today’s court processes and see that perhaps there’s some big advantages to a paperless court, for you, your staff, and your constituents. To borrow a phrase, there’s nothing to fear but paper itself. To help put those jitters to rest once and for all, today we’re walking through the process with someone who knows the path to a paperless court inside and out. Brad Smith is the senior justice consultant for ImageSoft, and he’s helped courts of all sizes and complexities transform from a paper based nightmare into a digital dream. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today, Brad.

Brad Smith:                         Thanks, Kate.

Kate Storey:                       Okay. Let’s say that there’s a spark of interest within a court in going digital. What do you think is the first thing that court needs to do when starting that path to paperless?

Brad Smith:                         Well, I think it really begins with the stakeholders in the courts market. And the courts market is larger than we all think. I think sometimes they think it’s just the court. But in that stakeholders, there’s the clerks. There’s certainly the judges in the court. There’s the prosecuting attorneys. There’s the sheriff. State and local agencies, for example, probation departments, the jail. You have other particular departments that currently are in the paper world, there’s a lot of workflow. But you’re finding people that are starting to at least wanting to do electronic filing. So once you start the electronic filing, or if the clerk has started to scan, we have an electronic document that needs to be sent to these other departments, and we’re really trying to make sure that everyone is on the same page when we’re going to do this process.

Kate Storey:                       Yeah. I imagine it’s kind of hard to get everything into a seamless process if you don’t have everyone on board.

Brad Smith:                         That is true. First of all, you’ve got the clerks. And they’re excited about … Maybe not exciting, but they’re scanning. They’re taking documents electronically. Electronic filing started back in 1990 with Lexis Nexis. That was a project that started with CLAD, complex litigated automated docket. They were doing it, so that’s great for the attorneys. The attorneys are electronically filing. And what’s ironic, if you even look at today’s eco structure, paralegal, legal assistant, the attorneys, they create the document electronically. They convert it to paper, so they can bring it on over to the clerk’s office, so they can scan it and then put it in a paper folder. And then they’re taking that paper folder, then delivering it on to the judge. And so just by the very nature, what we like to say at ImageSoft, if it starts electronic, let’s keep it electronic.

Kate Storey:                       Absolutely. It just seems to make more sense, and to make it just all flow a little bit better. Okay. We’ve opened the door with these officials. And they’re starting to take a serious look at how their court would operate in this new process.