Solutions for Rural Justice

Rural justice solutions touch many areas of social policy and concerns from a state and local level. There’s no clear answer to replacing a retiring workforce in a rural community or providing consistent law enforcement, but there are policies and clear technology strategies that can leverage funding effectively improve access to justice.

Consolidating Funding
for county courts through the state, but leaving day-to-day operations to the
district allows for more consistent spending on infrastructure and staffing (Reengineering Rural Justice in Minnesota).

Connecting Systems from other community and state organizations is critical between juvenile courts and tribal justice. The Federal Indian Child Welfare Act requires communication between the courts and tribal services to determine the best course of action for a juvenile offender. Telehealth and other community service programs and court systems/law enforcement records can be shared in real-time which can help offset poor internet access and bandwidth in rural areas.

Reducing or Eliminate Paper – If the process requires paper to move with the case or individual, it is inefficient and wastes time and too many man-hours in and out of the courtroom. A document capture solution, converting paper to electronic, searchable content is the foundation of automation.

E-filing and Case Management – Your organization may have court
automation in place. Does it extend to your most rural locations? Can a case be
filed, referenced or a sentence carried out electronically? Regardless of your
current system, this extension of technology is available. If there’s a case
number and a paper form, automation and improvements to access are possible. A
case number can populate an electronic form automatically with all relevant
information. A decision in the courtroom can automatically generate the next
workflow. This is a great example of enhancing an existing system with electronic
forms in the courtroom: ILINX at
Stanislaus.

Remote Access – Most experts agree defendants and defense attorneys should be in the same location, but they could be remotely engaging with the courtroom, or the courtroom could be mobilized. Although internet access in remote areas is an ongoing challenge, many document-driven interactions can be secured to locations like a library or post office with adequate bandwidth via either a kiosk or personal device.

ImageSource and our ILINX platform
can extend your courtroom and legal interactions to remote counties. Our ILINX
platform can engage with an existing system like Tyler, IBM or something homegrown.
ILINX can enable a remote courtroom and facilitate equal access.

Can we talk in more detail about your rural justice initiatives? ImageSource is providing a one-hour complimentary assessment of your current courtroom automation and delivering recommendations for improvement. If you are interested, please follow this link to sign up. We will contact you promptly to schedule the time.

https://imagesourceinc.com/rural-justice-landing/

Rural Justice Crisis Has Consequences for States

The Rural Justice crisis and the pressure on State and County governments to find solutions is well documented. States that otherwise may not have much in common like Alaska, Nevada, New York, and North Dakota have all worked on policy and incentive programs for law enforcement and lawyers to reside and practice or serve in rural communities. It’s also recognized that urban courts have rural justice reach as they need to communicate to all involved in a court-related matter regardless of their location. Studies agree that traveling 200+ miles to see a lawyer or make a court appearance is not equal justice under the law.

The state of Nevada has found that leaving problem up to counties to solve has created legislative consequences. The state introduced a bill in 2015 that died in committee and passed Bill 377 in 2017 that created a commission to find solutions, but none have been implemented. In those two years, various counties in Nevada attempted to solve the problem independently. In November 2017, the ACLU filed suit against the state of Nevada for violating the 6th amendment in six rural counties (ACLU Sues Nevada).

Rural justice initiatives and solutions must include collaboration between systems of record for Law Enforcement, Child Welfare Services, and Tribal Courts.  In 2006, the State of Alaska recognized the expansion of technology as one of the top five solutions to their rural justice crisis. They integrated their public health records, law enforcement records, tribal records, and court records to facilitate communication between all the organizations. This has been especially useful in communities where internet access isn’t guaranteed. Law Enforcement and Legal professionals can access all information in real-time and share with the individuals participating in the court system. The state has been especially creative holding court sessions in local facilities like high school gyms, decreasing the amount of travel for a defendant, plaintiff, lawyer or witness.

 Are your counties, public departments, and indigenous communities communicating seamlessly to improve rural justice?

The full Initial Report and Recommendations of the Alaska Rural Justice and Law Enforcement Commission can be found here: Alaska Rural Justice

Looking at Rural Justice

Changes in US life and industry have left states and local governments with changing communities and shifting resources. Legal systems are affected directly as rural communities become more isolated from legal resources and services. Meanwhile, lawyers in rural areas are retiring, moving and are not consistently replaced by newer lawyers or law school graduates.

State and local governments are faced with the problem of providing a speedy trial or access to justice and are faced with the problem of how to interact with rural community members. This includes all legal services initiated by individuals or initiated by the local government. There are some obvious risks like not collecting court fees efficiently, not providing a speedy trial resulting in a dismissal of charges, and perhaps more serious is the long-term risk to public safety.

There are infrastructure and access issues unique to rural areas. How far away is the courthouse? Is there a lawyer available in the community to advise or represent individuals? Does law enforcement have access to rural community members to provide protection, serve papers, etc.? Do the rural areas have internet access?  California and New York have been leading the way via nonprofit organizations encouraging (and incenting) law students to consider serving in rural areas, providing pro bono services via traveling lawyers and organizing judges to visit rural areas at regular intervals.

Has your organization developed a rural justice strategy?

Here are some additional resources on the topic

New York Rural Justice

One Justice

Mitigate Litigation Risk through Smart Banking Information Technology—Boost Your Bottom Line (part 6 of 6)

Meet Compliance and Regulatory Policies

Many financial services companies scramble to comply with new regulation, like SEC 17a-4c, and maintain compliance with legacy regulations, like Dodd-Frank Act, SOX, Know Your Customer (KYC) and other legislation as they grow. In addition, a changing corporate landscape can drive major efforts in IT governance.
Flexible information management tools will support your any number of policies and allow you to manage existing and future regulatory compliance with confidence, and protect you from unnecessary exposure.

Enable Reporting

Technology that allows you to easily aggregate and share process performance data is essential. If you don’t know where your processes are failing to meet compliance, you can’t fix them. Similarly, visibility into who, how and when content is interacted with is critical. It’s important to have a highly accessible and configurable content analytics platform to expose the precise information you need to detect risk immediately.

Support Granular Information Security and IT Governance

If you can’t configure your information management software security with ease and precision, then you can’t have visibility into performance or activity. More importantly, you can’t protect yourself against legal exposure. Systems that support robust configuration help you enforce the controlled collection of information. They also help you standardized formats and data management, which promotes infosecurity.

Manage Retention & Disposition

From a risk management perspective, disposition can be as crucial as retention. Managing the lifecycle of your data and documents does not have to be complex and expensive. A simple, automated solution can pay for itself many times over. 

Have a Dedicated Process for Records Requests

If you are plagued with requests, it may be worth investing in a solution that integrates any type of content—data, documents, email, assets and more—with line-of-business systems and databases to auto-fill, verify and authenticate requests. Smart systems can help meet deadlines with automatic confirmations, status updates and reminders, auto-redaction, storage of completed requests, trackability and more. 

Facilitate Powerful Search, Consumption and Delivery

Whether you are producing a report, audit results, images or data, it’s important to have a system that supports flexibility and speed. Some options might include:

  • Automatically convert document formats upon import or during workflow
  • Monitor databases and configure to automatically react when criteria is met
  • Search, collect and package actionable content into “time-bombed” mobile repository 

One example is the ILINX Event Tracker. We provided this solution for a large financial institution which is using it to stay compliance by meeting criteria specified in SEC 17a-4c regulations. It provides a reliable tool that creates non-rewritable and non-erasable formats of broker-dealer event records for storage on electronic media.

Other ILINX products that support your compliance initiatives include ILINX Capture, ILINX Email Capture, ILINX Capture Workflow, ILINX Content Store, ILINX Retention Management and ILINX Analytics.

Check out the 5 other posts in this series:
Ingest and Process Secure Data, Documents and Payments Real-Time During Customer Transactions 
Extend Online Invoice Upload Capabilities to Business Partners
Advanced Automation and Robotics Process Automation (RPA) Maximize Efficiencies
Integrate Data from All Systems to Optimize Business Process Management (BPM)
Control the Flow of Information and Access to Manage Risk and Identify Problems

Information Processing Visibility & Control for Banking—Boost Your Bottom Line (part 5 of 6)

If you are looking for ways to maximize the value of business information, you can be successful with both proactive and reactive strategies. In this post, we’ll cover access to and visibility of your data and documents, in-process and while archived.

Control the Flow of Information and Access, to Mitigate Risk and Identify Problems

Granular configuration control over your content will yield efficiencies, promote compliance and enforce information security. By proactively controlling access, visibility and actions for each user or group, you will protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information. InfoSec can be achieved using administrative controls through Active Directory permissions and configuration settings in capture, workflow and repository software. When managed correctly, it exposes only that which each worker is qualified to see and/or act upon.

Content Analytics: Real-Time Visibility to Statistics and Data from Information Processes

Information processing analytics allow you to gain visibility into your business processes, content data and information from external systems. This allows you to react immediately to potential problems to pinpoint risk potential long term. Customer transaction data to take a proactively nurture that relationship. Analytics dashboard can be specifically configured to provide different information to different groups, from business process managers to C-level executives.

Business process intelligence can help you:

  • Reveal business intelligence to make informed decisions
  • Identify processing bottlenecks to accelerate throughput
  • Gain knowledge about your content and how it's interacted with
  • Expose data from just about any system to enable productivity
  • Enable prediction to make better decisions
  • Monitor compliance with regulations (KYC, SEC, Frank-Dodd)
  • Serveil penetration testing results for security vulnerabilities
  • Analyze data flowing into and out of data lakes

Controlling access to your information should be easy to configure, but unfortunately in many systems it is not. ILINX information management software makes easy configuration a priority. Get administrative control over visibility and actions in ILINX Capture, ILINX Capture Workflow or ILINX Content Store, even without in-depth IT knowledge.
Our business intelligence platform, ILINX Analytics, is no different. It’s flexible and easy to use with any level of technology expertise. Depending on user permissions, you can expose data from any business system, from ECMs to ERPs. View and easily share reports. Expose, hide group and sort data, move columns and manipulate in multiple ways. And finally, gain visibility and insight into critical information that will improve information processing and help make better business decisions to boost your bottom line. 

Check out the 5 other posts in this series:
Ingest and Process Secure Data, Documents and Payments Real-Time During Customer Transactions 
Extend Online Invoice Upload Capabilities to Business Partners
Advanced Automation and Robotics Process Automation (RPA) Maximize Efficiencies
Integrate Data from All Systems to Optimize Business Process Management (BPM)
Meet compliance and regulatory policies to mitigate risk of litigation

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