Prepress
King County District Court Captures Court Documents in EMC Information Infrastructure
Tuesday 12. August 2008 - Solution Locks in Time and Cost Savings for Legal Process; Ensures Compliance with Court and State Laws
EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that The King County District Court (KCDC) of Seattle, Wash. has rolled out an information infrastructure for the fast and efficient management and distribution of court records and other legal documents.
“Our document management system is a big time saver for KCDC employees and legal professionals who regularly access court records,” said Andy Gilmer, King County District Court’s Database Administrator. “Before, people had to travel to the courthouse where the records were stored or the court had to mail files from one location to another. In addition to the time and costs associated with searching for and copying records, occasionally the wrong documents were placed in files. Now access is immediate and easy, making the process more efficient and productive for all.”
KCDC serves one of the most populous counties in the U.S. and processes roughly 230,000 cases each year – from traffic violations and misdemeanors to civil filings under $50,000. One of the first courts of limited jurisdiction in the U.S. to develop an online court records system, KCDC is also one of the only district courts to provide public access to electronic court records and manages a large number of traffic tickets electronically. Today, approximately 350 court employees, prosecuting attorneys, legal aides and probation officers access the archives to retrieve court records from any location.
KCDC also recently introduced the Booking and Referral System. Also known as BARS or eSuperform, this EMC-based application automates the exchange of information from regional law enforcement agencies with the county when a suspect is booked into a county jail, or when a criminal felony case is referred to the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
“With our new eSuperform solution, some of our police agencies now report probable cause statements to the booking facility using their laptops or a kiosk in the jail and the prosecutor transmits them electronically to the EMC information infrastructure,” said Gilmer. “We’ve automated the process to the extent that human hands seldom have to touch paper documents and the documents themselves have never existed in paper. The cost savings are huge because countless hours and reams of paper have been cut from the process.”
Working with EMC Global Services and Sierra Systems Group, a leading IT and business consulting firm, KCDC built the custom electronic court record solution. EMC Captiva(R) InputAccel(R) software is used to scan the documents into an electronic format, which are then transmitted and electronically archived to the EMC Centera(R) content-addressed storage system. When an original document is committed to the archives, a unique, digital fingerprint of the document is assigned. If the document is altered, a different fingerprint results. This protects the integrity of each court record and makes it easy to trace the workflow history. Today, the KCDC has archived more than 1.7 million court records in Centera.
“With legal records under our jurisdiction, we must pay close attention to court and state laws mandating document retention,” Gilmer explained. “Unlike the King County Superior Court, which is required to keep some court records forever, we have finite document retention periods. By using EMC Centera’s intelligent software, we’re able to automatically delete certain documents when they reach ‘end of life.’ This has made managing document retention and deletion cycles much simpler and more reliable and ensures we’re compliant with regulations.”
Additionally, KCDC also uses Centera Replicator software to mirror the Centera archives to another Centera system located in a separate geographical location. The replication creates two local copies as an additional safeguard against data corruption and other issues and enables KCDC to automatically failover if the primary Centera is offline.