Case Studies

Lucas County, OH

The Agency	Lucas County Court of Common Pleas Court Services Division Toledo, Ohio
Population Served	450,000
The Goal	Integrate multiple departments on one case management system ending duplication of work and increasing efficiency.
The Solution	Monitor Probation & Parole Monitor Pretrial Monitor Institutions Monitor Community Corrections
System Users	160

The Court of Common Pleas in Lucas County has original jurisdiction over all felony cases and its Court Services Division is composed of six departments including Pretrial - Presentence Investigation, Adult Probation, Electronic Monitoring, Centralized Drug Testing, Correctional Treatment Facility and Work Release.

The problem for the Court was that some of the departments did not have a case management system and the ones that did were using separate systems that did not share information. The Court wanted to bring together information from its varied departments to eliminate duplication in data entry, share information in real time, and increase efficiency among departments. They were looking for a case management system already developed and tested, but able to adjust to their specific needs.

Because of the need to implement Monitor for different departments a phased approach was adopted with the Pretrial-Presentence Investigation department going live with Monitor Pretrial in 2006 followed by each of the other departments ending with Work Release using Monitor Institutions in 2008.

Monitor meets the needs of the Court Services departments with one integrated system. Each department uses the information that it needs and adds information as it is generated. The Sheriff’s booking department provides via an interface pretrial personnel in the jail the client data needed to begin the pretrial interview process. Verifications are performed, Court results are entered, and pretrial defendant supervision then follows the clients. Adult probation, correctional treatment, electronic Monitoring, drug testing, work release, and client financial information are all documented in Monitor with each department building upon the work performed by other departments.

The departments all benefit from a shared information approach and each department benefits individually from the software functionality designed to specifically support their department’s business operations. According to Janet Lair, Director of Adult Probation, “Monitor has been wonderful. Supervisors can easily audit files and officers have access to all the information they need at their desktop. It meets all of our needs." Joe Easterday, Work Release manager reports that "Monitor saves us a lot of time and we are using much more of the system than we had originally planned. I love Monitor."

Lucas County has found Monitor clearly able to meet their goals. The greatest benefits, according to Project Manager John Bishop are "real time data sharing, as well as quick and efficient completion of reports to the court. Elimination of redundancy, quick and easy record retrieval and updating are also important gains. We are very satisfied that we now possess a fully integrated and ‘Cutting edge’ data management system for use by our various departments."

On an on-going basis, Larry McCarthy, the County’s system administrator of Monitor, reports that Loryx and the County have a great relationship and that the Loryx Support Department continues to be as responsive and helpful today as when the County and Loryx first started to work together.