Access to justice in Dallas will expand with new management system

On Sunday, May 21, our staff at the Dallas County Courthouse was getting ready for the implementation of Odyssey, our new case management system for our criminal courts, both misdemeanor and felony, set to launch the very next day.

When any major event is about to happen, there’s always a bit of trepidation. We had been waiting for this day for a long time, having lacked the tools to do our jobs as effectively as possible for years. The magnitude of the moment had us all on the edge of our seats that afternoon.

Why? For starters, we were moving criminal cases as far back as the 1970s to a new digital IT infrastructure — over 20 million records. We were not simply moving from an automated system to an upgraded automated system, we were literally emerging from the dark ages of technology into the 21st century for the first time. That’s not all. These updates and upgrades were going to help Dallas County expand access to justice to hundreds of thousands of residents for years to come.

We acknowledge the rollout to date has been rocky and that attorneys are frustrated because they have had limited access to the county’s criminal case files for the past two weeks.

We knew this transformation to a new case management system was not going to be easy. Something this big never is. With growing pains, there are always going to be challenges and frustrations when you are in the process of transferring so much information into a new system, especially when you are moving over 20 million documents. It won’t happen overnight, and the kinks can’t be worked out until the systems are up and running.

Let us step back. We started the deployment of Odyssey in February 2020 and a month later we were locked down because of the pandemic. It was a scary time for the nation and the world. As public servants, however, we still had to go to work and needed to continue ensuring the safety of our citizens, our staff and the courthouse.

Judges are all extremely passionate about carrying out justice every day. Case in point, making sure that defendants, if warranted, are getting out of jail as quickly as possible.

Dallas County Court’s previous system was far from perfect before the pandemic. For years, we received complaints from lawyers and colleagues not only in our county but also in neighboring communities’ courthouses, like Denton County and Collin County, about the technological roadblocks that hampered our pace, accuracy and more.

To show you what we mean, Dallas County was still on a physical, on-premises mainframe, and our legacy systems didn’t work with our neighbors’ modern systems. That meant that judges often had to learn our specific platforms and then switch over to the other systems when going from county clerk courts to district courts to get the information we needed to rule on cases.

Odyssey brings in standardized processes and uniformity — like switching from pen and paper to an automated process — that will be a great benefit to our judges. So, we now have the information we need at our fingertips in real time for the residents we serve.

The wealth of information we now have with Odyssey creates efficiencies and a much greater awareness to enable judges to bring about justice. The judicial system does its best when people believe that courts are fair and transparent.

Specifically, judges can now share and see cases in the other courthouses and around the jurisdiction, which is critical in instances where civil cases in one county are also relevant to criminal cases in another. To give you an idea, there could be family court cases that are tied into criminal cases either due to domestic violence or child abuse cases. There may also be probate cases because of the white-collar division, or there may be an allegation of fraud and elder abuse that are all tied together. Judges can now see it all in an instant. The prior system couldn’t handle that.

With the new portal, people can also view information quickly, like where their case is in the process of being tried, when hearings are scheduled and in which docket. Case management is not only faster and more accurate but also more efficient because we can pull, pool, and measure data better than ever before.

A key primary objective for us is to use technology to improve the services this office provides to our citizens and to implement best practices to create efficiencies that allow us to reduce the tax burden on the citizens of Dallas County. Most importantly, our long overdue digital transformation of the Dallas Courts will expand access to justice for everyone, whether you’re a judge, a clerk, a staff member or a taxpayer.

John F. Warren has been Dallas County clerk since 2007. He serves as chair of the board of directors for the Dallas Central Appraisal District. Judge Tina Clinton presides over Texas Criminal District Court 1, a felony district court. Previously, she served as judge of Dallas County Criminal Court 8, a misdemeanor court. She has also served as a municipal judge for area cities. They wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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