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With approximately 2.3 million residents, King County is home to more than twice as many people as Washington State’s next-largest county. Its county seat is Seattle, a bustling metropolis known for its iconic space needle and coffee culture (Starbucks, anyone?), and it’s home to the headquarters of major companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Costco.
Given the county’s scale, administering justice efficiently and equitably to millions of residents is no easy task. In 2016, the King County District Court decided to partner with Journal Technologies to modernize their case management system. At the time, King County District Court was the first jurisdiction to attempt to integrate eCourt and eSupervision.
The initial implementation plan was to prioritize courthouses by scale. King County District Court has eight court locations, and they hoped to begin with the smaller ones before moving to the larger, more complex locations. However, as Othniel Palomino, Chief Administrative Officer, observed: “You have a vision, and then reality hits.”
In this case, the reality was a huge difference in complexity between civil and criminal cases. Palomino and his team, through conversations with Journal Technologies, determined that it would make more sense to phase the implementation based on case types. This pivot to a “functional” go-live meant the King County District Court would roll out eCourt for civil cases first, with the full solution going live 18 months later.
The revised implementation didn’t stay the same for long, either. King County District Court realized shortly after development began that their current probation system was, in the words of Palomino, “melting down.” They needed to find a solution, and quickly, or they might not be able to continue their probation operations. This meant they needed to make the change to eSupervision as soon as possible; they chose to switch at the same time as their civil cases to ensure they could continue functioning.
As you might imagine, this expedited timeline for a new integration created some challenges. “The great thing is that you get the functionality first, but the difficult part is that you’re the first to experience any issues,” noted Palomino. This first phase of implementation went live in 2017, and both parties quickly realized that phase two would not be ready within eighteen months – there’d be too much work and fine-tuning.
Many of the challenges King County District Court ran into were related to change management. Their hundreds of users had been operating on a legacy case management system for years and were hesitant to make the switch. With such a substantial change, Palomino’s team received dozens of questions and concerns, and it took months to identify which concerns needed to be resolved in the system.
The final phase of King County District Court’s implementation went live in November 2020. Both the court and Journal Technologies learned a lot from this groundbreaking project, and according to Palomino, a key lesson is that it’s important to adapt your system based on user feedback. Sometimes this means modifying the solution, or sometimes this means realizing something isn’t working and going back to the drawing board.
For King County District Court, the judgment and sentencing tools were a good example of this. The initial approach generated nine pages of forms that judges filled out, causing delays because information was being uploaded to the system immediately.
To address this, Palomino and his team modified rules and workflows within eSeries to present the sentencing form in one page, rather than nine. This made it more accessible to judges, allowed them to go back and make changes if needed, and minimized the delays they experienced when submitting their sentencing decisions.
Configuration flexibility, according to Palomino, was the key: the implementation had its challenges, but the configurable nature of eSeries allowed King County District Court to learn from them. “One of the things I’ll give Journal [Technologies] credit for is that it’s a very flexible platform, and it enabled us to fix some of the things that we didn’t know would be a problem.” In the years since implementation, King County District Court has continued to do just that, refining their system to better suit their needs and help them work more efficiently.