The circuit court clerk is an elected position. I was elected first in two thousand three. In one of my other jobs, I worked for the sheriff, and we ran the jail. And the jail at that time was modernizing by digitizing all their medical records. And that’s the sort of the impetus when I decided to go modern. When I saw, well, a record’s a record, a file is a file. Why don’t we do this with court files? No one had done this before in Virginia. It had never been done. Nobody was digitizing anything. So I came for when I got elected, and I drove this with the Supreme Court of Virginia that handles our software and everything else to start to digitize all the files.
From there, everything kind of exploded from there. Once you do that, then you begin to see all these savings. I wasn’t really sure that was going to happen when we started, but it was monumental once we did it. The modernization was, how can we do this better? How can we become more like the medical community, more like private business? They were the ones that were really driving a lot of this institutional effort towards digitization.
The Neumo system as a whole has made the jury system easier, and it just streamlines everything else that we do. So because everything else is so technologically advanced, having this system be just as good as everything else is helpful.
Being more modern technology-forward has affected our relationships in every way. They are 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 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.
Being that Norfolk Circuit Court is a digital office and we are very technologically forward, the Neumo Jury system just fits in perfectly because it doesn’t require us to go back on anything we’ve already moved forward in. We’re already using technology to make it easier for our customers and for the Norfolk citizens to be able to access us at any time through digital networks. So this just seems like the right fit because you’re doing the same things that we want. I’m very thankful that I’m working in an office that’s so technologically forward because we’re trying to make things as easy and as accessible as possible, not just only for our workload, but for the people who come and need services. It makes it a much lighter and nicer place to be.
