Houston County District Attorney

Seminar:  Converting to a “Less Paper Office”
Houston County District Attorney’s Office
Friday, August 22, 2008, at 10:00 a.m. (Lunch provided)

Traditional prosecution, like most legal endeavors, involves vast amounts of paper.  The indictment, police reports, criminal histories, motions, crime lab reports, and transcripts are just a few of the literally thousands of documents that can compose your average case file from arrest to appeal exhaustion.   Last year, the Houston County District Attorney’s Office took the first steps toward eliminating the bulk of the paper involved in prosecuting a case by deciding to “go paperless”. 

Having initated the paperless office, we are offering a seminar on our experiences in the hopes that we can give guidance to other offices as they look at this issue.

In the seminar we will discuss our initial goal of eliminating most of the problems that constantly plague the business of prosecution.  We’ll talk about the goals of a “paperless” prosecution, about the obstacles including both internal and external opposition, and the proven benefits of such a system. We’ll talk about how we have expanded the paperless system to create an online discovery system that is saving even more paper.

We are fond of using the phrase “less paper” rather than “paperless”,  primarily because we realize that paperless is currently unattainable. While your office might be ready to ditch paper, other court offices won’t be.  This shouldn’t detract from the goal of drastically reducing the amount of paper your office handles. 

In the seminar we will talk about the infrastructure required.  Things like high speed Internet, computer network system, and some kind of case management system are all generally required to go paperless. 

We’ll talk about cost/benefit of a paperless system. High speed scanners, a dedicated scanning station, and storage servers are a must.  Cost savings are harder to measure, but our use of paper folders dropped dramatically, and we are eliminating file cabinets one by one.  We are hoping for general office savings of up to 30%, but we are still too new to the system to prove that.

We’ll talk about “burning the ships”, that is, a total devotion to paperless and whether you have the intestional fortitude to go for that goal.

We’ll talk about how the paperless file allows more efficiency because you’ll have no more lost files, reduced clutter, and better security because you can give restricted access to files based on any criteria you choose (unlike a paper file which they either have or they don’t). 

If you are thinking about going paperless, come join us on August 22 to learn about our experiences. We look forward to your visit.

DA Kelly Burke
Chief Assistant Jason Ashford