So COVID rocked everybody’s world upside down, and we distinctly recall when the state was going to be shutting down. And we knew that the Dauphin County Courthouse was gonna be staying open, but we wanted to minimize all risk to our employees of getting sick as well as the public. So the first thing we did was we went to our president judge and asked him to sign an administrative order which would allow us to use media communications and then we started with the processes.
When I first started the office, we were dealing a hundred percent in paper. There was quite a bit of backlogs. We were holding pending petitions and pending paperwork that needed additional information, and then our virtual platforms kind of started to initialize. And we were able to better schedule our days by carving out time to vet things on the virtual platform. Then we could schedule a block where we were having our virtual meetings and taking care of our clients virtually. It’s made us more efficient in ways that we can control our schedule a little bit more to kind of touch on every duty that we need to do.
Our whole business model has changed. We have gone from doing everything in person before COVID to now approximately eighty-five percent of our business is done virtually. That is huge. And it has changed the dynamic of how our team works and how we interact with the public. Now preparing ahead of time with all of the necessary paperwork and data entry, and then it takes about a five- to ten-minute virtual appointment where we then swear them in and finish up the application process. It saves them an inordinate amount of time and money. We have seen a huge increase in demand for certified copies of marriage licenses. In Pennsylvania, they are instituting the requirement to have real ID, and part of that real ID is to show name changes. And the way to show name changes is through a certified copy of a marriage license. We were able to process marriage licenses for couples throughout the entire state.
There were some clerks of the orphans’ court, some registers of wills who were unable to do marriage licenses. And since we were able to process them virtually, people from Philadelphia County, people from Lancaster County, people from smaller counties. They were calling our office. They were saying, “We need help. We’d like to get our marriage license. Can you help us?” And we were able to do that.
The added bonus to that was that we were able to increase revenues for Dauphin County during that period of time. And the Dauphin County commissioners who haven’t raised taxes for over nineteen years, they were thrilled to see an increase in revenues. It was a major contribution that our office was able to provide to the County.
