CENTREVILLE, VA. (PRWEB) – Avenu Insights & Analytics (Avenu) recently announced the State of South Carolina went live across all 46 counties with the company’s Family Court Case Management System.
The effort was spearheaded by the South Carolina Family Courts, in coordination with the South Carolina Department of Social Services, to modernize its platform and bring better information sharing, centralized data sources, and add greater efficiencies across all county courts.
“Our Family Court System had two major motivating factors to move towards a statewide system,” stated Michael Leach, State Director with the South Carolina Department of Social Services. “First was to provide better access to more accurate case information to the Judges, Court staff, the bar, and to our constituents. The second factor is that each of our 46 counties will have system support, maintenance and upgrades, regardless of their size or budget.”
Avenu is a leading provider of court and justice software applications and is accustomed to providing county, state, and Federal implementations to include the Office of the United States Courts. The company has noticed a significant trend towards statewide implementations which benefit by having economies of scale for the upgraded technology.
“Avenu is excited to deploy another statewide solution,” shared Paul Colangelo. “South Carolina is one of our forward-thinking clients who decided to move to a single platform for case management system statewide. The benefits of this are enormous and include having a single source of truth in the data along with accelerated workflows for more streamlined operations.”
About Avenu Insights & Analytics
Over 3,000 state and local governments have partnered with Avenu to drive positive results for their communities through software administration and revenue enhancement solutions. Avenu’s comprehensive software solutions digitally transform government by modernizing processes, providing online access to records, and reducing costs. Avenu also provides a robust ecosystem of revenue management services that identify and recover untapped revenue. State and local governments work closely with Avenu to increase revenue without raising taxes, streamline internal operations, and improve services by enhancing connectivity for constituents. Avenu is a portfolio company of Mill Point Capital. To learn more, visit www.avenuinsights.com.
About Mill Point Capital
Mill Point Capital is a middle-market private equity firm focused on control-oriented investments in the business services and industrial sectors. The firm works with executive partners to leverage its investment professionals’ experience, while providing strategic and operational guidance designed to drive long-term value creation in its portfolio companies. Mill Point is based in New York.
By Keith Ellery, Avenu Justice Solutions Leader
As we enter the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s clearer than ever that COVID-19 will have long-lasting effects on our way of life. But the changes wrought by COVID-19 have proven especially challenging for America’s court system.
Across the country, COVID-19 is delaying jury trials and impeding access to justice. In some cases, positive COVID diagnoses have led to mistrials, further delaying and complicating the justice process. Between social distancing regulations, safety concerns and a rapid shift to remote work for government employees, courts are struggling to maintain the normal operating procedures that allow juries to convene.
But as the old adage goes, justice delayed is justice denied. Approximately 74% of roughly 631,000 people held in U.S. jails are still awaiting trial and conviction. Without a solution to the challenges posed by COVID-19, our court system can’t deliver justice to these and many other people.
Fortunately, digital court technology can help.
2020 was no stranger to digital technology. We’ve all experienced the widespread and rapid shift to video conferencing technology in our workplaces, churches and even homes. Digital and online services and portals have provided a lifeline for workplaces, organizations and families confronting disruption by COVID-19. And we can bring the same technological innovation to our justice system.
Digital court technology can range from an online system for managing juries to electronic filing capabilities and cloud-based document databases. All of these technologies have been around long before COVID-19, but they hadn’t yet found widespread Governments simply had other budgeting priorities than digitalizing the courts.
But COVID-19 has changed those priorities. Faced with widespread delays and disruptions of justice, courts must now view digitalization as an imperative, not an option. If governments want to overcome COVID-19’s impact on the court, they’ll have to digitize now.
Take jury selection and management as a case in point. One of the biggest hurdles facing local courts today is how difficult it is to assemble jurors in a socially distanced and safe way. In the past, you’d have 300 or so people show up at a time and gather in a small space to wait to be used during jury service. With COVID-19, most courts simply don’t have the physical capacity to provide socially distanced jury meetings for all these people.
As a result, people are simply refusing jury duty summons out of concerns for their personal safety. To compensate, some court officials are even turning to the extremely costly measure of leasing convention center space to meet social distancing requirements. But neither of these outcomes delivers a safe, streamlined and cost-efficient jury management solution.
Things look different with an online jury management portal. At Avenu, we just launched the Clearview Justice Portal that has a number of plug-ins, including a juror attendance plug-in. The portal empowers courts to communicate with and guide jurors through the process of their jury service in a completely contactless way. Jurors can be checked in and pre-assembled for jury service but stay socially distanced in their vehicles. A contactless jury management system like this could easily and quickly become part of the new normal as we continue to battle the coronavirus.
But digital jury management is just one example among many. The larger point is that the technologies are out there to digitize the court in almost every aspect, and a digitized court system circumnavigates the roadblocks and the dangers posed by COVID-19. We may even start to see virtual jury trials in the very near future, something previously unimaginable.
With digital technology solutions, we can prepare our court system for whatever disruptions the future of the coronavirus pandemic throws at us. As we face both new spikes in coronavirus cases heading into the new year and the prospect of a coronavirus mutation, making those preparations now could mean the difference between justice delivered or justice delayed and denied.
CENTREVILLE, VA. (PRWEB) – Today Avenu Insights & Analytics (Avenu) launched its new Clearview Justice Portal (CJP). CJP is an applications integration platform offering a comprehensive suite of public-facing applications that enables Courts to provide a modern experience for its constituents, while also acting as a single point of “contactless” interaction with the Court. CJP will provide jurors with an enhanced jury experience allowing easy, streamlined and socially distanced interactions with the court system – features that are now more important than ever due to COVID-19 precautions.
“We’re thrilled to launch this state-of-the-art digital solution for streamlining the court system,” said Paul Colangelo, CEO of Avenu. “Avenu has decades of experience using digital technology to transform everyday procedures in government. Clearview Justice Portal makes court processes easier and more effective, in everything from managing jury attendance to storing and sharing court documents and information. It also provides citizens with a simplified and improved jury duty experience that is “contactless” and promotes social distancing.”
CJP features a flexible and extensible plug-in-based architecture that allows courts to implement and deploy CJP functionalities as needed. Additionally, CJP can integrate with non-Avenu supplied justice applications, enabling workflow improvements for any existing court system.
“Jury service is a vital civic responsibility and the cornerstone of the American judicial system,” said Keith Ellery, Avenu’s Justice Solutions Business Unit Owner. “But jury service today is difficult, time-consuming and labor-intensive. With CJP, we’re able to use digital and automation technology to make jury service simpler and more convenient than ever before. We think that’s a win-win for the courts and the broader public.”
About Avenu
As a leading provider in state and local government solutions, Avenu has partnered with over 3,000 state and local governments to boost revenue, optimize operations, and reduce costs. Avenu provides revenue enhancement and administrative solutions that uncover new sources of untapped revenue and deliver software that streamlines day-to-day operations. State and local governments partner with Avenu to increase revenue without raising taxes, streamline internal operations, and improve services by enhancing connectivity for constituents. Avenu is a portfolio company of Mill Point Capital. To learn more, visit http://www.avenuinsights.com.
About Mill Point Capital
Mill Point Capital is a private equity firm targeting control investments in lower-middle market businesses, with a focus on industrial and business services companies in North America. Mill Point’s experienced team of investors and Executive Partners seek to enhance the value of portfolio companies by executing transformative strategic initiatives and operational improvements. Mill Point is based in New York, NY. For more information, please visit http://www.millpoint.com.