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Consent-General Government # 19.
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| Board of Supervisors |
General Services |
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| Subject |
| Approve IT Innovations funds for the development of an eDiscovery solution to allow for electronic transfer of document-based discovery materials between the District Attorney's and Public Defender's offices and adopt budget resolution adjusting the General Services Department, Information Technology Division 2018-19 budget to reflect an increase of $30,000. (General fund impact $30,000) (4/5 vote required) (Yarris) |
| Recommended Action |
- Authorize the use of IT Innovation funds for the development of the eDiscovery solution to allow automated digital transfer and tracking of document based discovery material between the District Attorney's and Public Defender's Offices; and
- Adopt budget resolution adjusting the General Services Department, Information Technology Division 2018-19 budget to reflect an increase of $30,000.
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| Strategic Plan Goal(s) |
Advance Innovation
Collaborate to maximize success
Provide accessible, fiscally sound, dynamic and responsive services
Operational Excellence
Organizational Priorities - Law & Justice case management system development and implementation |
| Reason for Recommended Action/Background |
The Information Technology and Telecommunications Division (ITTD) of General Services Department (GSD) partnered with the District Attorney (DA) and Public Defender's (PD) Offices to develop a solution for electronic discovery of case related materials (eDiscovery). eDiscovery allows for electronic transfer of document-based discovery materials from the DA to the Public Defender. The new capabilities streamline what was a very manual and laborious process. Discovery material will now be pushed from the DA’s LawSuite application and automatically transferred to the Public Defender’s Record Management System. The system will automatically track delivery and receipt of the materials that were provided as part of the discovery process. This is an internal solution for document-based eDiscovery between Public Defender and DA.
All parties involved will continue to collaborate to further develop the system. Future enhancements include adding the ability to include multimedia (audio, video) based materials and access for external attorneys (Conflict, Private, and In Pro Per (self-representation)).
eDiscovery has eliminated manual and redundant processes in the Public Defender’s Office, allowing them to streamline office tasks and become much more efficient. Staff time has been greatly reduced, allowing the Public Defender to transfer additional workloads to the secretaries to unburden other staff members like attorneys, social workers, and paralegals.
For the Public Defender, the new solution has allowed their staff to be more productive as they no longer must perform the manual tasks of physically picking up discovery material at the District Attorney’s Office, scanning the documents, renaming, and associating the documents to an existing case on the Public Defender’s record management system. The estimated time savings on scanning alone is a total of 35 hours per week (aggregate between four employees).
eDiscovery has an on-going annual cost of $1,500 for expenses related to licensing. This cost is currently budgeted for appropriately, and will continue to be budgeted. Further and continued collaboration to expand the eDiscovery capabilities will require additional funding for development and infrastructure which GSD will return at a later date to secure once appropriate project scoping, time and resources analysis has been completed. |
| Collaborations (including Board advisory groups and external partner agencies) |
| Public Defender, District Attorney, County Administrator's Office, General Services, Department of Financial Services, County Counsel |
| Competitive Bid Process |
| N/A |
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| Fiscal Impact |
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| Source of Funds for this Expenditure |
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Explanation (Expenditure and/or Revenue) |
| Further explanation as needed: |
| IT Innovation funds have been requested for this work. On-going annual expense is budgeted for in the General Services: Information Technology budget. |
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