Las Vegas, Nevada
The Clark County Public Defender (CCPD) implemented JustWare | Defender to replace their multi-database, internally developed case management system and lead Clark County, Nevada in criminal justice statistical tracking.
CHALLENGE
Historically, the Clark County Public Defenders (CCPD) used four internally-developed FoxPro databases for their criminal, juvenile, appellate, and municipal cases on a Novell network. The databases were primarily used to produce mandatory statistical reports. The FoxPro applications and Novell network could not accommodate the strategic direction of the office. Ultimately, an application was needed to provide law office management functions for the CCPD.
We have been very happy with the service that New Dawn has given us. New Dawn has been very, very, very good at helping us to modify our program to give us what we need. They are very responsive.
Daren Richards, Assistant Public Defender
The functional areas identified were calendaring, client/relationship tracking, administrative tracking, performance monitoring, human resource management, and document management. In order to increase the efficiency of the staff, the CCPD also required an application that would integrate with the other criminal justice applications in the county.
SOLUTION
After an exhaustive industry search, the CCPD selected JustWare to solve the needs of their office.
CCPD implemented JustWare on over 150 workstations to manage the various case activities of the criminal, juvenile, appellate, and municipal divisions. Working in conjunction with New Dawn Technologies’ Custom Development staff, the CCPD information technology staff consolidated all four databases into one and converted this information into JustWare. JustWare’s ability to work in a multi-division situation provided all of the different divisions with the ability to take advantage of the central name information that is stored in JustWare, while not compromising the CCPD existing security and access policies.
RESULT
CCPD is now able to track cases through involved persons, which assists in tracking conflicts of interest. Attorneys are now able to manage caseloads and keep accurate records.
“We are able to verify what we are asking for; it makes our budget requests much stronger. We’ve even achieved some successes in receiving more resources due to the ability to show what we are doing in the Public Defenders office, which is directly related to the reporting functions in JustWare.” Darren Richards, assistant Chief Public Defender for Clark County Public Defenders Office.
The CCPD recently upgraded and went live with version 5.0 of JustWare. This new release of JustWare is designed to increase worker productivity, increase IT efficiency and to deliver an extreme amount of custom configuration options. JustWare 5.0 is written entirely in Visual Studio .NET, is n-tier based, uses service-oriented architecture (SOA), and leverages XML for all screen configuration and display. This cutting edge design enables each functional group in this large, multi-division office to have data input and display screens to match their work function.
The new My JustWare feature combines integrated and agency-defined reporting with data capture and display screens, providing each user with their own view of JustWare. My JustWare‘s design provides integrated real-time graphing, charting, and reporting for each administrator and team chief. CCPD’s staff and administration capitalize on this revolutionary design by providing team chiefs with clickable and drilldown views of their team’s cases, events, and calendars. It provides data entry users and investigators with recent case lists, recent searches, and more.
The global quick search function provides web style searching with intelligent ranking and sorting on all JustWare case and name information.
JustWare uses Microsoft’s Smart Client ClickOnce deployment to combine the ease of web deployment with the power of local computing. The combination of this powerful new design delivers IT efficiency and simplicity without sacrificing the feature-rich and user-friendly software that keeps JustWare users productive and happy.