Yamhill County Initial Impressions

Thus far, I am definitely enjoying my time at the Yamhill County Circuit Court. It is similar to the other courts that I have worked in (Benton, Marion), but there are also several striking differences.

The first, and most obvious, is the presence of the eCourt Odyssey system. Yamhill County is on its way to becoming paperless and while it is a noble effort, it is a struggle as well. For certain tasks, like filings for civil, domestic, small claims, and probate cases, becoming paperless is simply not practical. Criminal filings may be submitted to us electronically through the citing party, which is usually the Oregon State Police. Everything must be scanned into the system from older cases that were not paperless and this is proving to take up a lot of precious time. Clerks are finding it difficult to open and maintain new cases while having to scan documents for older cases (and believe me, there are lots of them), at the same time.

The second is the organizational structure. I will be submitting a copy of this to you later this week, but it is very different from other court management structures that I have experienced, so I thought it would be notable to discuss here. At Marion County (where I worked this summer), each department has one lead worker and one supervisor. These departments include civil, small claims, accounting, domestic, probate, and records. At Yamhill County, there are no department supervisors - all these departments are looked after by one Court Operations Supervisor. She reports directly to the Trial Court Administrator. In Marion County, the structure is much more tiered. There was an entire administration department that worked under the Trial Court Administrator (the person in charge of all court operations) that then reported out to the supervisors of individual departments. Interactions between court staff and the Trial Court Administrator were very limited. In Yamhill County, the structure is much more direct and I regularly speak with the Trial Court Administrator. He even assigns projects to staff, which would have been very uncommon in Benton or Marion County.

Yamhill County is indeed similar to Benton County in that they are two of the State's smaller courts. As smaller courts, they receive less funding. The work environment in both Yamhill and Benton County is stressed, catty, and generally negative. Staff complain nearly constantly about their workload and about the glitches in the new eCourt system. It has been a bit of a struggle at Yamhill County this far in that regard, but I am familiar with work environments like this because of my time spent at Benton County. I am excited about the opportunity to be a part of such a forward-moving event in the Oregon court system.