In the wake of bankruptcy and frozen budgets, the Public Defender’s Office in California’s Orange County is meeting its challenges head-on while contributing to the county’s financial recovery. To date, the Public Defender’s Office has saved Orange County an estimated $6 million in legal costs—thanks in part to a thin-client/server solution. The solution maximizes the office’s return on technology investments by allowing older hardware to deploy for CD-ROM legal libraries.
Presenting problem Following the bankruptcy of Orange County, the already underbudgeted Public Defender’s Office had to deal with problems arising from both monetary and staffing limitations. For example, the Public Defender’s Office was rebuilding older 286 computers handed down from other departments just to get enough word processing power for attorneys to prepare their own legal briefs.
The challenge: Leverage older hardware for legal research applications.
The underlying technology problem facing the Public Defender’s Office was the need to deploy its mission-critical 14-bay CD-ROM legal libraries to attorneys and investigators. The CD-ROM libraries would facilitate faster, easier legal research from home or the field to improve productivity. Since the county couldn’t afford to hire a larger secretarial staff, attorneys were preparing their own legal briefs using systems that ranged from older 286 and 386 PCs to powerful Pentiums. The diversity of the Public Defender’s user base coupled with its economic hardships exacerbated the search for a remote-computing solution that could address all the office’s needs. The question of the hour was this: How was the Public Defender’s Office to offer greater remote access to legal information during a time when capital budgets were constrained by the county’s fiscal problems?
Hardware and software The thin-client/server networking environment for the Orange County Public Defender’s Office includes:
The Orange County Public Defender’s Office deploys CD-ROM legal libraries to branch offices over telephone lines.
The Public Defender’s Office uses a thin-client/server solution based on WinFrame multiuser application server software to deploy its 14-bay CD-ROM legal libraries to attorneys at home, investigators in the field, and emerging branch offices over standard telephone lines.
Solution and results Since implementing the thin-client/server solution using WinFrame as an application server, user productivity in the Public Defender’s Office has increased significantly because attorneys can access the CD-ROM law library from home and other remote locations. In fact, the access provided at remote locations facilitated the opening of more offices without the need to buy expensive, duplicate CD-ROM libraries. At the same time, lawyers at any location can share the legal research done by co-workers, saving time and effort. These changes allowed a complete restructuring of the Public Defender’s Office.
The thin-client/server solution allowed the county to open two new offices and hire more attorneys without adding to the system administration staff. This savings allowed them to start taking the second and third defendants in multidefendant cases at about one-fifth the cost of what private attorneys were billing the county. When the numbers started coming in, it turned out that the implementation of the thin-client/server solution paved the way for almost $6 million in savings and allowed the Public Defender’s Office to do more with less resources.
The efficiency of the solution saved about $6 million in private attorney fees.
The Orange County Public Defender’s Office has continued to grow, adding more offices and attorneys—all without increases in IS staff. To date, the office is supporting 165 attorneys in 10 locations with an IS staff of only three, thanks to the efficiencies of the thin-client/server solution. Using WinFrame Enterprise as the software, the Public Defender’s Office was able to meet increased demand for dial-up access from home or from its numerous emerging branch offices. WinFrame also allowed the older 16-bit machines to access the same information as the latest 32-bit Windows-based PCs owned by some private attorneys.
The solution continues to save Orange County money by providing Internet access to county investigators in the field. Instead of placing long-distance calls to a branch office, roaming investigators can connect to the WinFrame server via the Internet to access attorney assignments and to download information from their notebook computers. The WinFrame server provides the Public Defender’s Office with an Internet gateway, allowing multiple investigators to share a single IP address.
The Public Defender’s Office is exploring other uses for this thin-client/server solution. They’re considering extending the reach of their mission-critical legal libraries to the Internet and to their intranet. The office plans to use WinFrame’s Windows ALE capabilities, which will allow 16-bit and 32-bit Windows, client/server, or legacy applications to be embedded in or linked to HTML Web pages and viewed from a Web browser.
The Public Defender’s Office is currently explor-ing Web-based applications.