VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Imagine that you're driving down the street one day, going about your life, not thinking there's anything wrong, and just being plucked out of your everyday life for 15 days. Is your employer going to keep your job open for you? Is your landlord going to let you keep occupying the space without paying rent? The reality is, for our clients who are usually living so close to the edge, that can be devastating. Anything that helps us save time to represent our clients more efficiently and be able to get them out of custody quicker is beneficial for everybody. A public defender is someone who represents someone, usually when they've done the worst thing they've ever done in their life, and our role is to show who that person is and not what it is that they did. The L.A. County Public Defenders is the biggest and the oldest public defender's office in the United States. The public defender's office was caught, like many of these legal organizations, kind of stuck in the past. We had an exclusive paper case file system. Cases would stack up in people's files, file cabinets on their desks. When we're on a paper file system, everything is reliant on the system working. Oftentimes files would be misplaced, they would be hard to find. We had to modernize our case file system. I mean, we really had no choice in it. What this office needed is a technology consultant. We needed a partner to create a digital twin of a 110-year-old organization.

As a client executive, my primary responsibility is to lead the response effort for any RFPs that come out. I remember working with the Salesforce account executive talking about going after this. I realized that the L.A. County Public Defender's Office could be the poster child for criminal justice management's digital transformation. It takes someone who understands the technology and understands the questions that need to be asked in order to kind of pull out those needs from the client and then translate it back to programmers. It's fascinating to see all those developers become experts in the criminal legal system. There was so much more to it than I ever imagined.

So I'll meet the client at the first appearance, take down their information, fill out the green sheet or the yellow sheet. How many different routes a different case or a client can go? And go through the arrest report with them. Depending on the charge and depending on the type of person, whether they're an adult or a child. I have served as a therapist. I have served as a friend. Whether mental health issues. I have served as a social worker. They have to know so many things. As a guidance counselor, you name it. Our biggest goal. The sooner someone is. Is for our clients to come out of the system. Out of the system. Without coming back. The less likely they're going to be to return to the system. That's the fight.

At a very granular level, all the information that is now stored in CCMS allows the lawyers and support staff to access the digital case file at any time from anywhere. And it has improved the quality of client representation because you have the client's really complete information at your fingertips. And that was never the case prior to CCMS. On a macro level, it helps us identify trends. We want less people to fall into the criminal legal system and be more proactive and provide alternative to incarceration. It's all about using data to correct the record and to show value of who we are and what we do.

About a year ago, I had a client who was suffering from mental health issues. And we were able to get him a probationary outcome on his case. He was doing really well. But because the court was concerned about his progress, we continued to have court dates every couple of months. He also had to check in with probation once a month. And one day I noticed that his case was on the list for the following week for a possible violation of probation. When the probation department creates a report, it automatically feeds into CCMS. Contact had been lost between client and his probation officer. Pre-CCMS, there's no way I would have known about that. I used CCMS to get a hold of our client that same day. And so that next week we went to court. He showed up with the necessary paperwork and the judge calling the case with the expectation that she was going to issue a warrant for him. And I'll never forget the expression on her face when she saw that he was standing next to me. And the judge just took the matter off calendar. What would normally have happened pre-CCMS is that same probation officer would have written that report. And the court would have called the case, called out his name. He wouldn't have been there because he didn't know. And the court would have issued a bench warrant for him. And he would then be arrested. The judge would keep him detained on a no-bail warrant for at least two weeks for the probation department to do an investigation. He would have lost his job that he had just gotten. He would have lost his apartment because he wasn't there to pay rent. His car probably would have been repossessed because he wasn't working and able to make that payment. I mean, things like that happen. They're now avoidable when they weren't before.

CCMS continues to evolve. We've been using it for years now. And I can tell you just before I came in here, we got an email about a new feature that's being rolled out. The thought that this type of system could be used in other cities and impact more lives is really inspirational. Technology advocates like myself in public sector, they don't only advocate for efficiency, cost saving, and paperless, but they advocate for a much larger return of investment, which is helping people and bettering their lives. Thank you.