We don’t ask a lot of citizens in this country. We ask them we’d like them to vote. We ask them to register for the selective service if you’re a male. We ask you to pay taxes, and we ask you to come in and do jury duty.
And none of those are on the top list of people, and jury duty is always people go, I don’t want to do Certainly, many citizens will say, It’s my civic obligation. Most people are going, How can I get out of jury duty? So, the idea is to try to make it less onerous for the citizens who come in. We too try to recognize that they are making a sacrifice to get here, And we try to make that as painless as possible.
Success in the past may have been just getting through the process, but now I feel like the success is partnership and helping us be more effective and able to work better with the public because Neumo’s system makes it so much easier for us to do our daily work and flow and it actually makes it easier for the jurors. So they are very happy and we get a lot of compliments from them as well.
The people are able to get their questionnaires answered and that lets us know if they are even eligible or able to even serve. So because we get that done so quickly and early, they’re able to let us know sooner if they can even serve. So if someone has a doctor’s appointment or a vacation planned, we want to know that as quickly as possible.
That way we can take them out of the system so that they don’t get for not showing up. So for that, being able to access the system so much earlier and let us know that information, it helps when it’s actually time for us to have our juries.
It’s much easier to get people in because we can check them in quicker because we have the ability just to scan their summonses and then immediately populate them into the attendance and for them to be able to get their own attendance letters and kind of give them some responsibility for their jury service and be able to put in their own temporary excusals that we can then approve versus everybody calling in to ask for those.
I would say that being more modern technology forward has affected our relationships in every way. They’re very excited to come here because they want to see how fast and how efficient we are. We have judges and deputy clerks that we can do things outside of being in this building or at our desk. And it has affected relationships by making making us more exciting and the public feels like they are part of it too because that’s happening in Norfolk and might not be happening in other cities surrounding.
When you’re dealing with the number of jurors that we ask to come in, 1,200 a month, the summons we have to put out, the phone calls we get are overwhelming. If we didn’t have a robust computer system, we’d drown. We wouldn’t make it. And I looked everywhere on the market, Neumo was the best one. And I would say that through all the years we’ve had it, it’s never really let us down.
