The Utah Prosecution Council is responsible for training prosecutors and law enforcement officers throughout the state of Utah, which is home to more than 3.4 million people. Their stated mission is “to provide quality training for state and local prosecutors as well as law enforcement officers through an exchange of information and experience to ensure the administration of justice reflecting the highest ethical and professional standards.”
A case management system is a crucial piece of a justice system, and information technology director Ron Weight is tasked with providing required CMS capabilities to prosecutors statewide. The Utah Prosecution Council has developed an interesting business model: using grant funds, they provide case management software that agencies across the state can opt into for a small administrative fee.
There have been three different attempts at providing this software, each with varying degrees of success. The first, back in the 1990s, was a third-party desktop application that, while relatively effective, had to be manually installed on the server at each office location. This was a step in the right direction, but given the amount of travel required, was not a viable solution for the long term.
Next came an in-house software system developed by the state government’s information technologists and rolled out in 2006. According to Ron, this system was also a step forward, but “still had a lot of issues.” This system had no automation, so it required a lot of manual labor and data input, and certain key features were missing that were daunting to build from scratch.
Given the shortcomings of the earlier systems, the Utah Prosecution Council decided to provide agencies throughout the state with a more effective system. A selection committee that included Ron Weight, county and city attorneys, and legal assistants was tasked to review the RFP respondents to select a new CMS provider, which eventually resulted in the selection of Journal’s eProsecutor software. Their unique business model made for an intriguing implementation challenge: typically, eProsecutor is configured with a specific agency in mind, but for the Utah Prosecution Council, it had to be flexible enough to meet the needs of agencies statewide.
To ensure those needs were met, the council appointed subject matter experts from several different counties to help identify needs and provide the JTI team with guidance. Larger counties, for example, need different workflows and automated components than smaller counties. Compromises were made to ensure the configuration would work for everyone, but the result was a single system that streamlined operations no matter the agency size.
The implementation went live in early 2019, and according to Ron, there have been very few issues since then. He functions as the go-between for the Utah Prosecution Council and Journal Technologies, helping new agencies roll out the system and providing support for existing clients. When there’s a question Ron can’t answer or a bug that needs to be fixed, he works hand in hand with the JTI team to resolve the issue. That’s led to rapid adoption of the system across the state: there are now 47 jurisdictions that have implemented eProsecutor, with a total of 270 users.
Ron says the two biggest benefits of the system are the consistency across the state and cost efficiency. Since everyone is leveraging the same case management system, it’s easier for him to provide training and support to users. According to Ron, a group approach has made things vastly cheaper for counties versus building their own system or approaching it independently with a vendor – in his words, “they get it for a bargain.”
As for whether this state-sponsored model could work in other places, Ron believes it’s a possibility. He says the setup in Utah is a little different than other states, but most states have prosecutor councils, so it’s a model that could prove quite cost-effective. Whatever the case, the Utah Prosecution Council provides an intriguing way for states to examine case management software deployment.