Los Angeles County Public Defender supports the mission with modernized case management.

The Los Angeles County Public Defender is the largest and oldest established Public Defender office in the nation. Complete with over 700 attorneys and 400 legal support staff, “our job is to represent these individuals in the County of Los Angeles for any and all interaction they may have with the justice system. Our zealous public defenders are the only voice they have when they become justice involved,” said Mohammed Al Rawi, Chief Information Officer at the Los Angeles County Office of the Public Defender. “Our job goes beyond just representing charges like felonies or misdemeanors— we are dedicated to supporting residents in the County of Los Angeles when they have any interaction with the justice system holistically including mental health, immigration, suspended licenses, eviction and homelessness.”

The L.A. Public Defender has a measurable mission to reduce incarceration and the collateral consequence of contact with the criminal justice system. The team is on a mission to find alternatives to incarceration programs and promote efforts that can provide choices for defendants, and most importantly, second chances. “We are inspired and empowered by our mission,” Al Rawi added. “By deploying modernized technology and fostering innovation in our business, we are able to strategically and dynamically allocate our resources to best represent the accused.”

Indigent defense provides services to defendants who cannot afford legal counsel on their own and the Public Defender team in L.A. County is passionate about ensuring fair trials and protecting the residents’ rights under the Sixth Amendment. “Historically, indigent defense suffers from parity in funding and resources with prosecutors and law enforcement,” said Al Rawi. “But we chose to leverage technology and innovation to help narrow that gap.”

The L.A. County Public Defender’s office represents over 140,000 residents per year charged with felony or misdemeanor charges. With the sheer number of clients and the limited number of attorneys, it was imperative for the team to automate the legal operations and free up attorneys time to be able to focus on “lawyering”. “We have transformed the way we do business here in L.A. County,” Al Rawi added. “With real-time, longitudinal, client and case views, our attorneys are able to quickly get a complete picture of their clients and find vital information to prepare for defending them from arraignment through final disposition.”

The narrative of the mission changed for the L.A. County Public Defender as they tackled 107 years of complexity, endless paper trails, and a 26-piece legacy system being used to house, manage, and access data. Objective data coming from 160-million records has been modernized and consolidated into a cloud-based system, providing the tools needed for next-level support to clients. “Unlike other agencies’ systems that are limited by case view, our lawyers have a trove of data that they can view intuitively from people, case, charge, disposition or geospatial views to help them analyze and build their cases,” said Al Rawi. “The cloud was used as a tool to re-shape the culture we had been living and introduce a new narrative for doing indigent defense business in the county of Los Angeles.”

For a team of 1,200 employees, 700 of which are lawyers, a customer-centric view was needed. “It was vital to create a one-stop shop that would encompass everything our lawyers needed to come up to speed, regardless of physical location,” Al Rawi added. In the past, arraignment lawyers would walk into the Public Defender's office and wait for the discovery paperwork to come in. From there, they would have moments to review the material before going to speak with the client and beginning the arraignment process. County lawyers were obtaining dockets of information and getting only a brief time to grasp an understanding of the case and develop their defensive stance before entering the courtroom.

“Lawyers are now receiving client information digitally often before the proceedings. They are able to get a head start looking at the case which has allowed our attorneys to more effectively counsel clients,” said Al Rawi. Implementing a system that would streamline data, documents and digital evidence allowed the team to better serve clients and the justice system of L.A. “We are shifting the narrative from a case-centric view to a people-centric view which has enabled us to objectively illustrate the benefits of holistic representation, diversion and alternatives to incarceration models and the tangible benefits of decarceration,” Al Rawi added.

The L.A. County Public Defender’s office launched a cloud-based client case management system with 360-degree visibility into clients and their cases, while maintaining high standards for the security and integrity of their data. The solution they designed allows for scalability and future business enhancements, which makes the system future-proof to accommodate the ever-changing justice legal system. “Our lawyers are provided with a digital twin of their business processes with the ability to see their clients through a longitudinal lense— their cases, their charges, records, digital evidence, dispositions and post conviction,” said Al Rawi. “We can generate reports that break down decades of data on clients by case, by charge, by race, by gender, by age, by disposition, by supervisorial district and more---giving our County Board of Supervisor the ability to make informed decisions to drive justice reform in the County of Los Angeles.”

Technology acted as an efficiency tool for Al Rawi and the team, optimizing analog business processes and streamlining complex operations. More importantly, the platform transformed the way L.A. County would do business, now having full access to all information anytime, anywhere. Their transformation journey modernized and consolidated dozens of legacy systems into one, with an agile approach that is capable of addressing highly complex workflows and legal processes. The transformation journey scaled accordingly and instilled synergy between the mission at heart and the business processes at hand.

Check out how it works:

Secure case management: Al Rawi and team built out their client case management portal on Government Cloud complete with Shield to ensure high levels of security and help meet their compliance requirements. “The data we are processing is highly sensitive and we must ensure maximum security to protect the attorney-client privilege information we house,” said Al Rawi. “Meeting County, State and Federal security requirements, data encryption, real-time auditing, and proactive security monitoring was on the forefront of our system design and implementation.”

When a case assignment is first brought in through the defenders office, a digital case and person file is created for the attorney to access. The attorney is automatically notified about the new content available and they are able to log-in from anywhere, anytime to begin processing the case. Records on Salesforce have become a one-stop shop and a place for case teams to store and access all relevant data for each individual client at hand.

Customization for efficiency: Al Rawi and team were attracted to the idea of a cloud solution that was platform based with the ability to custom build onto that for greater flexibility and on-going adjustments. With over 60 custom-built objects now on Lightning Platform, the L.A. County Public Defender has introduced new elements to the legal matter management process. Attorneys are now able to track the whole lifecycle of their clients' cases and easily collect data from pretrial to trial digitally.

Collaboration to streamline processes: Sandbox was layered on for testing and development as well as to boost collaboration efforts when working between multiple environments. “With the ability to easily collaborate, our clients are stepping into court confident on how they will best defend their client,” added Al Rawi.

“A platform foundation with custom capabilities has allowed the Public Defender to adjust our approach when needed and consider all possibilities when trying to get from point A to point B,” Al Rawi added. “With projects and cases that contain such a variety of asset evidence, our ability to streamline and scale in a secure environment has brought greater time to value for the heart of our mission: our clients.“

Perhaps the most transformative project in the department’s history, has the Public Defender’s office on top of operations. “We have always been at a disadvantage with fewer resources like lawyers, investigators, forensic experts, social workers, assistants, compared to prosecution and law enforcement agencies, but technology and automation have allowed us to narrow that gap,” says Al Rawi. “We are leveraging technology to make information easily accessible and eliminate hours of administrative case prep using business automation.”

“We are showing value to the constituents and their tax dollars that are being used to pay the lawyers by getting county indigents the resources they need to ensure they do not residivis,” Al Rawi said. “We are changing the mandate of indigent defense having presence beyond the constitutional mandate, we are demonstrating through objective data the benefits we provide to the community.” The introduction of the cloud brought little disturbance to users engaging with the on-premise system but reinvented government in Los Angeles from a community legislative perspective.

Already receiving over 140,000 client case profiles for the year, the system is churning and burning as attorneys focus less on obtaining and studying content, and more on defending the residents of L.A. that are in need of support. “The future is data driven and we can no longer rely on the perception of thinking that incarceration is the way,” Al Rawi concluded. “The cloud has provided us with a new movement where everything will be benchmarked and challenged by objective views of data and this will start the momentum to change the narrative of how business is done in the justice system.”