Any efficiency really begins with a recognition that people work really hard to pay for this building, pay for the staff, pay for their work. So you start there trying to respect the fact that citizens pay for this with tax money. And so you try to be as frugal as you can using that money efficiently, trying to provide the best possible service. So I sent two of my staffers out and they said, Go out and find me a jury software system that will be able to do everything we need. And they came back, and they came back with one recommendation. It was the predecessor corporation for Neumo.
And what it did is it just allowed you to do things with fewer people. And that became apparent real quickly when all of a sudden we got a twelve percent productivity increase. And now you’re doing the work with just less people. And the people are more productive. So they’re doing less manual input, and now they’re able to do the critical thinking that the public really needs in a building and a job like this, which is complicated. And now we can provide more advice, we can solve more problems because we’re less worried about constantly having to keystroke things in.
Neumo Jury has made it very easy for us, especially when we are creating and populating panels for judges, making sure that they have all of their information, having everything streamlined for the excusal and temporary excusal process. It’s also been 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 to be able to put in their own temporary excusals that we can then approve versus everybody calling in to ask for those.
Neumo has modernized things so that we will use less paper, which makes it better for our budget, not just less paper, more efficient technology that keeps us working and streamlining between the jurors and other things that we do here. Success in the past may have been just getting through the process, but now I feel like the success is us being a 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’re very happy and we get a lot of compliments from them as well.
Lists becomes stale over the course of a year, and the jurors we look for are no longer living here because Norfolk’s a highly transient area. That is so important. We spend so much manpower. We actually have a summons.
We give it to a deputy sheriff who gets in a car and drives out to the juror’s house or apartment looking for them, handing it to them, or posting it to their door, then writing down what happens. If they don’t show up, have to do the whole process again. It’s incredibly time consuming not a great use of manpower. So Neumo’s ability to filter out that list and give us a continually evolving list that becomes more and more accurate as we go along, that’s absolutely critical.
