Yamhill County 09/17-09/21

Thus far, I have been working solely on updating the Odyssey court management system. The system "went live" in June 2012, but it is still far from complete.

When court cases from the old court management system (OJIN) were ported over the Odyssey, many of them were either not ported over or are missing important documents. I have been working on putting together an Excel spreadsheet of the cases that need to be updated. OJIN held court cases from approximately 1983 to 2012. This amounts to millions of court cases, just in Yamhill County. I currently have a spreadsheet of 60,000 cases that need to be updated in Odyssey or need to be scanned into Odyssey. This is crucial in the event of an appeal. By statute, the Courts must keep court cases in their court management system for a certain amount of time, usually several decades.

With the implementation of Odyssey, Yamhill County court went paperless. All files were scanned into the new system and then put into storage for a period following implementation - these files will eventually be shredded. However, hundreds of these cases were not properly scanned into the system for whatever reason and now, I am in charge of inventorying them. Thankfully, the court did not shred their paper files yet so that employees can retrieve the ones that I am finding that were not scanned properly.

In my opinion, going paperless is silly. As an accounting major, I will never work for a firm that is "paperless." It is incredibly inefficient to try to do everything using technology, despite the push to do so in order to be "progressive." In the court system prior to Odyssey, paper filings and case documents could only be lost because of human error. With various safeguards and policies in place, this rarely happened. With the implementation of Odyssey, case documents have been lost by the Odyssey system for reasons that court employees and Odyssey technicians do not understand. This causes a lot of grief for employees, myself included.

When I am finished with my Excel inventory, all the missing cases will have to be retrieved from storage and re-scanned. This takes valuable time and resources away from employees and is a cause for severe frustration and a drop in employee morale. Employees already do not care for the Odyssey system, and technology glitches like this one are bound to make it even more unpopular.