Prosecutor's office going 'fileless'

By Doug Rapp, Staff Writer

March 25, 2009 09:29 pm

— The Daviess County prosecutor’s office, in the basement of the courthouse, isn’t the biggest office to begin with. Look at the files stacked in the floor and under desks and it’s clear the three-attorney office needs some room.
Now they’re doing something about it, by scanning files as they come in to store electronically.
“We’re not going paperless,” said G. Byron Overton, prosecutor. “We’re going fileless.”
Overton said the idea of going fileless came from a continuing legal education event he attended. The organizers there asked how much time prosecutors’ staff spent on file work. Overton said he and others guessed 25 to 30 percent. The event organizers said if they asked staff the prosecutors will find it’s probably closer to 50 percent.
Overton said when his office needs older files, stored at an undisclosed county location, the administrative assistants would have to physically retrieve it.
“Somebody has to go over there, trek down there, find the file, get the file out and bring it back down here. It takes a lot of time, and that happens weekly,” Overton said. “We’re just running out of room.”
“Hopefully it’s going to save time and, eventually, save money.” he said.
Overton said the attorneys in his office will get laptops with “access to all files all the time.”
“There’s no more looking for files,” said Dan Murrie, chief deputy prosecutor. “Everyone can work on the same file at the same time.”
The prosecutor’s office has six administrative assistants, each equipped with a scanner, and they are scanning documents as they come in. The assistants are working overtime to get files scanned.
This year, the office is keeping the regular files and scanning them to see how it goes. The child-support side of the prosecutor’s office, with one attorney and four administrative assistants, is doing the same.
“The game plan is by January next year we’ll just have digital files,” Overton said.
The files are being scanned with a program called Laserfiche. The files are backed up twice at the courthouse and a third time off-site. Overton said even in the unlikely event all three backups failed, the court would have the original file. Overton also noted the prosecutor’s files are largely made up of other agencies’ files, so they could be reconstructed if need be. He said the original documents needed for trial — such as blood-alcohol test results, documents from other counties and states and other supporting evidence — fit in one filing cabinet.
The scanned files can be arranged by name and the files can be searched by using a particular word, a feature called “optical character recognition.” Another feature allows a user to put a digital “sticky note” for others to see on the file.
Once the office scans this year’s files, they plan to tackle the older files in storage, Overton said, adding that is planned for next summer and could be done by interns.
“It’s a never-ending process,” he said.
“We need more room. The court house has limited space. Everybody needs more room.”