Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We're excited to share with you a powerful story about the profound impact of digital transformation on the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office. The digitization has undergone not only positive impact for the day-to-day work of the public defenders, but it has also changed the lives for the better of the residents of LA County, the clients that they serve. But before we dive in, I'd like to give our panelists a moment to introduce themselves, share a bit about their role and their experience, and maybe why they chose to become a public defender. So Justine, let's start with you.
Thank you, James. My name is Justine Essick. I am the Chief Deputy Public Defender for the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office. I've been the Chief Deputy for going on three years now, but I've been a public defender in this office for almost 27 years. And I think my mom would have said that I was born to be a public defender. I would characterize myself as a true believer. I'm someone who has always wanted to stand up for people who other people wanted to harm or prosecute. And I'm just really proud of our office and public defenders generally. And so I'm excited to have been invited to be on this panel. Thank you so much to Public Sapiens and to James for inviting us to speak today. And I will kick it over to my colleague, Melissa.
Hello, everybody. My name is Stephanie Gore. I'm from Public Sapiens, and I was on a project where we built out LACPD's CCMS system. So building that out ended about a year ago, and now we are working with the alternate public defender's office.
Excellent. Well, thank you, all three of you. And my name is James Kessler. I am a senior vice president with Public Sapiens, where I've been for the past 27 years. I currently lead our state and local government business unit. And with that role, it gives me the great pleasure to be able to partner with the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office as we went through this digital transformation journey. And I'll tell you a little bit about that story, and then I'm going to play a video. So if you go back many years ago, 2017, 2018, Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office began its digital transformation journey in partnership with Public Sapiens. The L.A. County Public Defender's Office set out to transform its antiquated data storage and management systems so it could more effectively provide public defense to the most vulnerable residents of L.A. County and shift from a case-centric system to a people-centric system. So to kick things off, I'm going to play a video that explains this more, give you a bit of a background about this digital transformation and the impact that it's had. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. I am optimized for sound and video. Can you all see my screen?
Yes.
Great. All right. Well, I am going to invite you inside Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office, the oldest and largest public defender's office in the nation. So this is a seven-minute video, so sit back and relax and hear the story of CCMS and how it came to be. 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. 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 do. The L.A. County Public Defender's 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. It 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 we'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. Are there mental health issues? I have served as a social worker. They have to know so many things. A guidance counselor, you name it. Our biggest goal. The sooner someone is. Is for our clients to come 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 clients 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 this 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 the 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 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 for joining us on that journey inside the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office. And now that you have a clearer idea of what this digital transformation entailed and its impact, we're going to hear from our panelists who have the firsthand experience with this project, the problems it aimed to solve, and the solution. So Melissa, we're going to start with you. Can you describe the challenges that the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office faced with the paper-based system? How did it impact the work of the public defenders and their clients?
So in my little intro, I had stated that I was with the office for a couple of years before I ever became an attorney. And in that capacity, I was working facilities. So my responsibility was for each of the offices and also our records retention policy. So I became very familiar with the different places. And at the time, because storage was such an issue and we had such a huge volume, we literally took over buildings and buildings at an abandoned hospital in L.A. County. And we had another storage warehouse out in the desert. And those places were just filled withAnd when I say we, the office at large, had a go-live date in October of 2020. And so, we were right in the middle of the scariest parts of COVID. And, you know, at the time, we kind of thought to ourselves, oh my goodness, is this the right time? Is this just insane that we are rolling out this incredible change to the culture of how, you know, what our client case file looks like, what our whole system looks like? And I won't, I certainly don't want, you know, COVID to come back in that capacity again. But what I will say is it turned out to be the perfect time to roll out CCMS because, you know, we were under a trial extension order by the courts, so everybody wasn't in jury trial all the time. It was at a time when, you know, access to physical case files was not convenient or safe. So, the ability for our lawyers, for our staff members to go on to CCMS, find out the information they needed about a client so that they could appear in court, sometimes having to appear for another attorney who was ill or couldn't appear in court was, you know, it was really just perfect timing. So, I would say to another public defender's office just starting out, be bold about those decisions. Don't be afraid that it's not the right time. Take that chance. Go through the bumps and just do it because it is transformational. And I would say the other thing from an administrator's perspective, the other suggestion I would give to a public defender office is make sure that your leadership teams understand their responsibilities in terms of having their teams adopt CCMS. That was something that, you know, was not necessarily intuitive for us, right? I mean, you know, people are used to working with paper. There's always going to be some resistance. But we took the time to go through with each of our leadership teams, the lawyer leadership teams, the secretarial leadership teams, the paralegal leadership teams, investigators, social workers, et cetera, et cetera. You know, what should your team be doing in terms of accessing CCMS, using it, adopting it? And what are your responsibilities as leaders to make sure that this adoption is happening? So we saw a tremendous increase in adoption once we had appropriately trained our leadership teams, and that made all the difference in the world. Because while CCMS is this incredible digital transformation, inputting information into CCMS, using it as the client case file adoption, makes it a million times better. So that would be my primary advice to other people.
Well, thank you, Justine. Maybe Stephanie, from an implementer's perspective, do you have any advice for other public defender's offices?
Yeah, I mean, selecting subject matter experts across the public defenders, across paralegals, investigators, like social workers, to really get an idea of the key features that are going to make a difference for them, I think is really important.
James, can I touch on that a little bit?
Absolutely. I just want to double-click, underline exactly what Stephanie said. We have a steering committee, a CCMS steering committee. Melissa is an integral part of that steering committee. Changes and tweaks to CCMS are made based on recommendations of our staff members to the CCMS steering committee. This is not a system that was designed by managers or leadership or managers. It's designed for the practitioners, the people who do the work every day. And nothing is perfect, right? And everything needs to evolve. And our steering committee of subject matter experts who are in the courts every day doing the work, they're the ones that people bring new ideas to and innovations to and changes to. And then I hear about it later, right? And so that is such an exciting, not top-down process. And it's one of the things I think I'm most proud of about what CCMS has done for our department.
Yeah, that's great. Another piece of advice would be to keep it simple at first. With the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office, we started off just rolling out the system to those that represent adult clients. And so it was another year down the road until we started to work with the juvenile team. And so we're constantly adding on to the system, which makes it much more user-friendly.
Yeah, I'd agree with that approach as well. Like, always start small, iterate, and add. And not pretend that everyone's going to know all of the requirements up front. Because you've got to use the system, see how it's working, and then evolve it from there. And having that steering committee of subject matter experts is really, really important. All right, well, one last question before we get to another film clip. And Justine, I'm going to ask you this one. Since this is a women's conference, in your experience, what are some of the unique challenges that women face in the criminal justice system? And how does CCMS help address these?
Yeah, I mean, you know, what I'll say is this. Women have some unique needs in the criminal legal system. And particularly here in Los Angeles, our board of supervisors, our community groups are very focused and intentional about what we can do to decarcerate women and young girls and how we can really support programs that support women. And so one of the things that CCMS has done for us, as my department head, my boss, Ricardo Garcia, advocates to the board of supervisors for programs that we need in the county of Los Angeles for our clients, for funding requests, is we're able, at an executive level, to pull data on demographics, on numbers of people who are prosecuted and for what crimes and what kind of sentences they get. And so at a large level, separate and apart from the wonders that CCMS does on a granular level for the lawyer in court, but at a larger executive level where the advocacy happens for funding, for programming, we're able to pull reports and report that to the board of supervisors, to private funders. It's helped us to develop programs like our Guiding Reentry of Women program, which has saved so many women from state prison sentences and unnecessary incarceration and allowed for alternatives to incarceration. So that data piece, that being able to identify and be really transparent about what the data trends show, has been transformational in the advocacy that our office has been able to do.
That's great. Thank you, Justine. So we're going to do a little bit of a transition here, and we're going to spend the next few minutes showing a real-life example of the life-changing impact that CCMS had on one Los Angeles County Public Defender's client. To tell this powerful story, we released a new short documentary film called Forgiving Johnny. It was created in partnership with Academy Award-winning director Ben Proudfoot and his Breakwater Studios, in partnership with Pugliese Sapient and the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office. The documentary itself is 19 minutes long, which we are not going to play today. We're going to play about a one-minute trailer, but it is now publicly available for streaming globally as of this past Tuesday, and we'll make sure that you all have a link to that so you can watch it in its entirety. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen again. And I'm going to go to the next slide here, and we're going to play this one-minute trailer from Forgiving Johnny.
You can tell a lot about a country by how it treats its most vulnerable people. That's why I'm here. It was my brother, but we raised Johnny. But everything changed. We can't control him. His disabilities were causing his interaction with the criminal justice system. His maximum punishment is 20 years in state prison. I want him home, but Johnny hurts my husband. Diversion is an opportunity to avoid a conviction by doing treatment. Breaking away from the criminal justice prosecution, the chance to change everything for Johnny. But this case is limited by the amount of time we have, and paper equals time. Forgiveness is the best thing that we can have because it makes our heart free.
All right, that was great. So the film follows the journey of Los Angeles County Public Defender Noah Cox and the case for his client Johnny, a developmentally disabled individual suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome disorder. And he faced a 20-year prison sentence after an altercation with his brother-in-law. Johnny's family never intended for him to be arrested when they called the police for help. But as we heard, in the state of California, those with a documented history of developmental disabilities can be diverted into a treatment plan instead of prison. The cumbersome paper system made it challenging for public defenders like Noah to obtain all the necessary records and documentation to achieve these life-changing outcomes for their clients. But with CCMS, all current and past cases are assigned, managed, tracked electronically via CCMS, including more than 160 million court records, the ones that were buried in those warehouses that we talked about earlier, which are now accessible through CCMS digitally. And so CCMS played a critical role in the outcome of Johnny's case by accelerating Noah's access to these critical files, including the documentation that showed Johnny's fetal alcohol syndrome that led to his intellectual impairment. He was able to secure treatment instead of prison time for Johnny, which was a life-changing change for Johnny. Technology helped to change the course of Johnny's life. But that's just one case. And the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office being the largest in the nation handles, what, 200,000 cases a year? It's quite an overwhelming caseload. So imagine the ripple effect. If that's the impact you can have on one case, multiply that by thousands. So, Melissa, Justine, Forgiving Johnny is a powerful story of the human impact that has resulted from CCMS. In the context of your roles as public defenders, can you share an example of your own experience of how CCMS is aiding your office'sYou may be thinking that everything's going one way, but they have a mental health or some other kind of an issue that really your approach should have been different, because every person is completely different. Everybody's needs are completely different. The approach you take with that person is going to vary from person to person. And so with CCMS, you can identify by looking at old case notes, old cases, and kind of get an idea of how to approach that client to be the most effective. It also allows you to review the notes from other attorneys, kind of like how I had said earlier about doing more collaborative type of work across the different offices. One of the things that we've been successful with in juvenile is because with the technology, we're able to have it in the courtroom, we're able to work on cases while we're sitting there waiting for cases to be heard, because a lot of the day is hurry up and wait. I have been on the record talking with my judge, and he's like, you know what, with this client, I'm really having a concern about education. And I'm like, you're on it right now while we're typing up, I'm doing a work request to get my education attorney on board. Nope, I got it handled. And so then that also increases the credibility with the client and the family that they know I'm on top of it there, and I'm there to help them to turn their life around. It also gives credibility with the court to know, no, this is my client, and I'm going to make sure that they're taken care of. And I'm going to be the one that's going to be there to support him. So trust that I'm going to get the job done. And so it's really helped with the clients, the families and the courts, because it gives us more information and more power to be able to assist them.
Well, that's great. Thank you, Melissa. Justine, anything you want to add to that in terms of how it makes you feel when you're either in court or meeting with a client?
You know, so now that I've taken on an executive leadership role, I'm not in court as much as I used to be. I do, however, still, you know, keep myself active. So I tried a case last year. I handled resentencing cases. So I am in court. And, you know, I'll say this. For me, after 27 years in the office, somebody who was pretty dedicated to paper in my early years as a public defender, it has been a culture shift when I did a murder trial last year. You know, I'm somebody who is used to writing on butcher paper the elements of the crime and, you know, the standard of proof in a criminal case. But CCMS saved my life because I had a prosecutor who would change which witnesses they were calling, you know, for the next day very frequently. And I had a judge who was keeping us on a tight schedule. And so when I came into court ready on, you know, five witnesses and the DA announced he was calling six completely different witnesses, I didn't have that paperwork with me. But what I did have was CCMS. So, you know, he thought he had caught me off guard in my advocacy, but I was able to so quickly adapt. And so I think, you know, that's an example of how as public defenders we can really use that technology. But it's also, you know, the part that Melissa was talking about, being able to go back into somebody, a client's other cases or, you know, other information about the client is so critical because, you know, you may be able to see on the first day you're meeting a client that in the last case they had, you know, there was a psychological report that describes for you your client's mental health history. And that's going to help inform you as to how to interact with that client on the first day, right? You're going to maybe be mindful and intentional about some of the issues that you already know are existing for that client. And information is key and it's a premium. And so to have that at your fingertips when you first walk into lockup really is meaningful.
That's great. You hit on something that we talk about at Publicis Sapient. We're a digital business transformation company. And so we talk about with each other and with our clients, like, what is success? And true success is when you're successful on multiple paths. One is where our clients, in this case it would be you, being more effective at your jobs. And you describe scenarios where it's like, you know, you're right in court and you're being able to do things in real time or they're switching witnesses around. So that makes you more successful. But then it's also more successful for your clients and getting the better outcomes for them in court, which can change their lives. So if you can be more successful and your clients can be more successful, that's what true digital transformation empowers. So thank you for those comments. So we've gone to the last 15 minutes of our session today. And what we would love to do is turn it over to our audience and give you a chance to ask questions. When we prepped for this session, we thought about like, wow, we can go on for hours and hours and hours with all the stories and anecdotes. But we want to answer your questions. So if you'd like to take yourself off mute or drop a question in the chat, we would love to answer your questions. And if either, you know, Jeff or Kennedy want to help us with that as well, we'll take your help. But the floor is open to questions from the audience. There's got to be someone out there. You're dying to ask that question. I know you're out there. I'll facilitate it out of you somehow. I'll pitch one to kind of get it started. So if you're, you know, not in leadership and you're trying to encourage your leadership to go this direction, what thoughts do you have for someone who's, you know, not in a decision-making position? What should they be telling their folks? They can share this with them. You know, and we have someone asking what the cost is. So how do we encourage the folks who would look at this and go through an RFP process and the need of this and why they should consider this product when they're going through the process? I think that's a question for Melissa. How would you, if you had to incentivize me to sign up for CCMS, you know, what would you, what would you tell a recalcitrant leadership group that didn't want to go this direction?
You know, it's, I've always been kind of on the techie side. So I've always done like spreadsheets and, you know, to keep logs and stuff. I think I would kind of look for, cause look towards showing them what, you know, our particular system does, you know, because I think it's easier when you kind of show somebody to say, Hey, look, this is kind of what's out there and look at what it's capable of doing. You know, it's really hard to kind of just kind of talk. I'm more of a shower than I am a talker. Talking about, when we kind of talk about some of the developments on the CCMS committee, you know, we're always looking for what's going to be the most user-friendly, you know, what improvements can we make for that, but also it's like, okay, when we started this project, our office had 23 separate databases. And if your office is one that's the same, where there's just different databases for, you know, just different things to be able to say, Hey, look, let's merge it all into one. Because for example, like with like the, our Pius unit or our public integrity unit, like that information about law enforcement. Now we're so much more richer in information than what we were before, you know, where we have more of the instant access to, okay, I have officer Mamiga who is in my report and what other things is, have they been involved in? I can see the other reports, you know, and just kind of talking about it from like the, those kinds of perspectives of, would be one of the things I would kind of recommend. And then I remember back when I was working in DV court specifically, the client, sorry, lights, the client would come in and say, Oh, well, this person has been, Oh yeah. You know, she filed a claim against her last three boyfriends too for domestic violence. You know, well before CCMS, we would never have been able to have shown that to be true, you know, and to try to get those reports and stuff. But now if I'm getting suddenly getting opening up, you know, Melissa, victim Melissa or complaining witness Melissa, and I see, wait a second, she was a complaining witness on four cases. Well, what was it? Oh, wait, there was a pattern. There's all these different guys. Wait, what my client's telling me is true. It's kind of being able to give them those kinds of examples to be able to say, Hey, look, we can articulate from what we're seeing from our clients and put the information together in a more comprehensible way to be able to defend our clients. So from a practical, you know, person on the ground, that's one of the things that I would probably say, probably a longer answer than I was needed.
No, I mean, I'm sold. But, you know, the other thing I would say too, in terms of convincing a leadership team, you know, is just the way that your executive team can use the data to help in terms of advocacy for funding, for programming, for what we really need for our staff and our clients. Those numbers, you know, are critical because we are now independently able to show that outside of having to gather data from, you know, exclusively the court or from,