The Paperless Prosecutor

I decided to draw up a proposal for going paperless and run it by my boss. While the idea seemed reasonable to me, I wasn’t sure how it would be received by my boss and the rest of the staff. If it didn’t make sense to the county attorney, it wouldn’t matter what anyone else thought, so I decided to lay out a proposed plan to Frank and see what he thought.

After reviewing the proposal, he asked a few questions and then said “do it.” With a green light from the boss, I shared the proposal with the rest of the staff.  The reactions ranged from “I can’t wait” to “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  Surprisingly though, there wasn’t really much resistance to the idea, just some concerns and questions about how such a transition would work. I think the fact that most of the staff was already used to being able to access digital copies of court documents and police reports from their desktop, the idea of a paperless file perhaps didn’t seem that far-fetched.

With the proposal approved, the real work was about to begin. We needed some type of interface to work with a digital file. Our CMS doesn’t currently include an imaging component and we didn’t have funds allocated to purchase a system from a vendor.  While searching for an affordable solution I came across an open source project that looked like it might be flexible enough to meet our needs…TiddlyWiki.

After a few weeks tweaking the file, it looked like it might actually be a very nice solution to our problem and end up providing our office with a far more useful digital case file than I’d originally imagined.  That was the middle of October.  While it’s taken longer than I’d hoped, the file is just about done and ready for a test run.