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(Editor's note: The following is another in a series of case studies that show how document management apps, enterprise content management tools, and other applications help companies.)

Background

The Office of the Public Defender, Tenth Judicial Circuit, is a Florida agency that provides legal representation to adults and juveniles charged with a crime who cannot afford to hire an attorney, and to the mentally ill and developmentally disabled who are subject to involuntary commitment proceedings.

The Tenth Judicial Circuit of Florida consists of three counties. The current public defender is J. Marion Moorman. Since Moorman's election in 1984, the office has grown to more 140 employees, including more than 75 lawyers who serve clients in the circuit and county courts of the Tenth Judicial Circuit, as well as appellate clients in the Second District Court of Appeal, the Florida Supreme Court and the federal courts.

The agency understands how imperative effective and timely case management can be to the future of those charged with a crime, and, as such, determined the need to access thousands of case files and other documents from multiple locations, over a network, to best represent clients that urgently needed assistance.

The Challenge

The numbers are humbling: 500 cubic feet. 40,000 cases. 1,250,000 images per year. If a document was needed for review, it had to physically be retrieved from a central storage room and viewed on microfilm or paper.

Richard Weis, finance and accounting director for the office, stated: "Clearly we were in need of a better way to manage our case files with the growth of the office and case load over the last 10 years. I knew that an electronic capture and workflow solution was in order -- one that could allow us to quickly convert the closed case files, easily manage day-forward documentation in-house, and index and store all in a secure fashion that would enable us to retrieve anything requested or to be researched at the touch of a button. Plus, we wanted to get away from microfilming for archival purposes.

"Even better," Weis continued, "would be to find a solution that enabled us not only to manage case files electronically, but to manage non-case related mail that is received each day -- a workflow solution that allows this information to be routed to the appropriate person or department electronically and accessed via special search parameters."

The Solution

"We had been introduced to the DocuLex Goby Capture product a number of years ago as part of an overall case management solution, and discovered that now DocuLex offers an entire end-to-end solution that incorporates Goby Capture and other valuable document management capabilities, called Archive Studio," Weis said. "Archive Studio provides us with a fast, secure and reliable way of storing and accessing our files."

The office employs Archive Studio by DocuLex in two main areas -- case related documents and non-case related documents.

When a case file gets created, a Goby Profile sheet is placed in the file. This is a template included with the Goby Capture portion of Archive Studio that gets added to each document or group of documents that need to be scanned. This template includes selectable custom index metadata, specified by the Office of the Public Defender, and determines automatically where these documents should be filed once the case is closed, has reached a certain age, and is ready for conversion. Most of the office's closed case files are sent out annually to a company that specializes in scanning high volume jobs, and the resulting TIFF images are returned to the office.

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