The circuit court clerk is an elected position. I was elected first in two thousand three. The circuit court is a court of record, so it’s the main trial court. When I took over the jury system, it was a mess. We had this two part system where we’d send letters out to people and basically say, hey, send the letters back and tell us if you have any reason you can’t be a juror or anything like that. And people figured out, if I just ignore the letter, no one will ever come after me. So we’d send out like 17,000 letters. And each year, it got fewer and fewer and fewer came back.
We’re just saying, how do we just get this to work so that the wheels don’t fall off? So when Neumo comes along, I said, okay, we’ve got this system now, and we can kind of track people. And now we can do it, and we can keep track of the database, and we know where people are, we can find them, and we can hold them accountable. Neumo allows us to do that. It doesn’t overwhelm the staff. When you’re dealing with the number of jurors that we ask to come in, twelve hundred a month, the summonses we have to put out, the phone calls we get are overwhelming. If we didn’t have a robust computer system, we drowned. We wouldn’t make it. But that was the software we liked. It was being utilized in other places, I just thought, this is a Cadillac. This is the one we need.
I would say that our partnership with Neumo always been pleasant, respectful, always there when we need them. We’ve never had an issue with the system at all and that is wonderful because most systems we would have to call them all the time or try to figure out things but with Neumo we’ve actually never run into any major problems at all and they are always ready to help and always there for us.
Working with the Neumo team, there haven’t been too many interactions because the system is so reliable that we don’t often have issues that come about. But when there are issues, reaching out is very simple. Send a quick email, and they are super responsive, super quickly, which is very helpful considering these jurors do not wait. When we have an issue, we bring it to them, and they are so professional and willing to help us in any way that they can.
Working with the Neumo team has been wonderful. I’ve had all of my questions answered. All of the things that I wanted to see possible solutions for have been met very quickly. They’re very knowledgeable about the system itself and kind of getting us to a place of where we want our system to be also.
We just couldn’t duplicate that. We tried. We even talked to our Supreme Court of Virginia to see if they could help us devise our own system in house to do it, and we just couldn’t come close to what the Neumo product delivered. It would take us millions of dollars and years to even come close. It’s never really let us down. And that’s rare in the software world. Things break, things fall apart. We’ve never had that problem with the jury software. The product itself is fantastic and continues to be.
