Williamsburg to join court management system

KINGSTREE—The Williamsburg County Council voted to begin the process that will eventually lead to the integration of county courts into a new case management system.
Dr. Joan P. Assey, Director of Information Technology for the South Carolina Judicial Department, briefed the council on the status of the statewide court case management system (CMS) and gave Williamsburg County the opportunity to implement the system in 2010.

The purpose of CMS is to allow quick and easy operations within the state court system, dealing with everything from jury management to case files within the various state courts. The system would essentially bring all of South Carolina’s justice system on the same page in many of its operations, something Assey said has been part of the vision of Chief Justice Jean Hoefer Toal.
“In the year 2000 she knew it would be difficult to get more judges,” Assey said. “And we had to get smarter and use technology to its most efficient cause.”

31 of the states 46 counties have already been integrated into the system, accounting for 78 percent of the caseload in state courts today. Berkeley, McCormick and Marion counties are currently being incorporated, with Dillon, Abbeville and Newberry scheduled for addition after that. Assey estimated that by the end of the year nearly 84 percent of the state’s caseloads would be managed by CMS.

Among the benefits of the system discussed during the council presentation, Assey listed heightened security, backup and failover and recovery measures that will be the same at SC Supreme Court in Columbia. There will also be a second tier of support that is being tested with the newly incorporated systems that will be available.

The system will cost the county, including support and hosting expenses, a total of $40,000 a year. Charges for the system will not begin until a year after it is fully set up, which is hoped to be sometime in the next year. Williamsburg County would not begin paying into the system until July 2012.

“You get a free year,” Assey said. “No vendor would ever do that.”

The system will be hosted and maintained largely in Columbia, something that Assey says is a huge benefit.

“We become your IT staff, for a fee,” she said. “It does a lot… You have to think how integral it becomes to the way we do business… When we house the data, you have the same security as the supreme court.”

Assey said multiple back up files and safety measures are the key to any system, saying “redundancy is important,” meaning multiple copies of the files will be kept.

This was the second time Assey had met with Williamsburg County officials to discuss CMS, the first with county judges, clerks of court and the county supervisor at an earlier date. Asset thanked Supervisor Stanley Pasley, as well as a number of other county officials, for their help in working with justice officials to make progress in moving the county closer to joining the system.
“It really takes the sponsorship of many leaders,” she said.

The council passed the measure to pursue the project, thanking Assey for her presentation.