Modernizing Courts & Justice through Data and AI

Tyler Podcast Episode 82, Transcript

Our Tyler Technologies podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Each episode highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give the podcast a listen today and subscribe.

Episode Summary

Regardless of size or location, courts and justice agencies have one thing in common — the need to improve access to justice for residents, to empower legal professionals, and to enable collaboration across justice agencies.

On this episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast, Brian McGrath, President of the Courts & Justice Division at Tyler Technologies joins Media Relations Manager Rikki Ragland to discuss how court systems across the country have modernized their approach. From connecting courts, prosecutors, public defenders, as well as jails, auditors, inspectors general, police departments, and supervision offices – Brian details how accessible data across all offices in the justice system creates operational efficiencies, eliminates redundancies, and minimizes errors. Brian also dives into the hottest topic in the legal technology space, artificial intelligence, and breaks down its practical use cases within courts and justice.

Guest: Brian McGrath, President, Courts & Justice Division, Tyler Technologies

Brian was named president of Tyler’s Courts & Justice Division in February 2022. Brian joined Tyler in 2004 and spent his first eight years with Tyler’s Appraisal & Tax Division (now the Property & Recording Division), where he worked in various positions in support, implementation, development, and operations. Since joining the Courts & Justice Division in 2012, Brian has held leadership roles in product management, development, and operations, most recently serving as senior vice president of operations. During his tenure with Courts & Justice, Brian led the electronic filing business and has been instrumental in driving the division’s cloud transformation.

Transcript

Brian McGrath: Virtual courts, which just thinking about virtual courts, you know, that's the idea that I'm not actually driving down and being physically present in a courtroom with a judge or a prosecutor or that particular experience. Courts could not shut down law enforcement could not shut down. Jail can't shut down. The court system could not shut down. And what the pandemic did was just accelerate the adoption of that to where you could no longer afford to experiment with it. It was a must.

Jade Champion: From Tyler Technologies, it's the Tyler Tech Podcast where we talk about issues facing communities today and highlight the people, places, and technology making a difference. I'm Jade Champion, and I'm the Marketing Program Specialist here at Tyler. I appreciate you joining me for another episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast.

Today, we're bringing you an exclusive interview with Brian McGrath, Tyler's President of the Courts and Justice division. In this interview, Rikki Ragland, Tyler's Media Relations manager, asks Brian how the court systems have evolved, key factors driving the evolution of an electronic court system, and tips on how to begin modernizing your court system. I hope you enjoy their conversation.

Rikki Ragland: Hello, and welcome to our Tyler Tech Podcast. I'm Rikki Ragland, today's host, and I'm very excited to speak to our guest, Brian McGrath, who is President of Tyler Technologies Courts and Justice division. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today.

Brian McGrath: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to I'm excited to talk.

Rikki Ragland: I am too. You know, there's a lot to get into when it comes to Courts & Justice - or C&J as we refer to it - but Brian, I was hoping you could start off the conversation with providing our audience with a bit of context about the challenges court systems have faced, historically, and how legal software solutions factor into those ongoing challenges?

Brian McGrath: I'll give you a little bit of background and I'll speak to the breadth at a high level.

When you think about court systems, I've seen an interesting observation or comparison to the operating room. If you think about the operating room, in a hospital, compare what you see today to what you saw two hundred years ago, and they're wildly different. But if you think about the physical courtroom, the way that it looks today in a physical courtroom from two hundred years ago, they largely look similar to the untrained eye, but I will tell you that there is quite a bit. I'm sure we'll talk about it that through the course of discussion, quite a bit of innovation and advancement that's going on.

Just think about the history there for courts, for centuries they operated largely with paper. All of their processes are rooted in that paper. They also operated in silos - silos could be geographic silos, legal silos, participant silos, etcetera. And so largely, they've had technology that’s been introduced to address each one of those silos, but it's really remained rooted in that paper and based off of those roots of these siloed systems. And so what we've really tried to do at Tyler is produce this common core of technology just to take these disparate systems, pull them into a common core, connect citizens, attorneys, the judiciary, etcetera, so that you have a solid foundation that you can then start to automate multiple processes and start to connect different pieces of information that really streamlines everything for the folks that I just named.

And we've been we've been successful and really fortunate through the years in in kind of following to that model of connecting these systems in that common core and radiating out from there today, we serve about 45-60% of the population with our Courts & Justice systems that we produce. That ranges from courts that are, from coast to coast. We got California over to Maine. We operate now even 20 statewide systems that are leveraging our technology and, fun fact, if you think about all the counties in the United States, our systems operate in the largest county by population in LA. About ten million citizens, but we also scale down to the smallest county in, Loving Texas, which is sixty - not sixty thousand, sixty - six zero - people. So, we've got breadth and and quite a bit of depth in there as well.

Rikki Ragland: I'd also like to talk about one of your Tyler clients of Courts & Justice, and that's the Choctaw Nation. And I want to, I really would like to put a spotlight on this because they were featured in the news for their use of Tyler Courts & Justice solutions replacing their legacy system.

But it's a very unique story. And if you could tell us, it's a little bit more about the Choctaw Nation's use of Tyler court system for those who have who are not familiar with the story.

Brian McGrath: It's impressive from a technology standpoint, but more so from the attitude and the results of the Choctaw Nation and what they've really brought. They had largely manual processes in disconnected physical locations with fairly low volume.

So, it didn't put a lot of pressure on the manual processes in their disparate offices.

But with, what we saw, I believe it was in 2020, where they saw a tremendous influx of just an increase in their jurisdiction, but then an influx in cases that they had to manage, they knew that they needed to act. And it's not as though they were starting from square one, but they largely did enact a technology transformation such that they were starting from a very low foundation and went live on day one with tremendous connectivity, tremendous automation, able to connect up multiple rural jurisdictions all on one common system so that you now had access not just for citizens, but all those different agencies were wired up on the same system despite being over a pretty large geography set, and they did so in a very short amount of time.

And not just stood up the technology, but then set up all the business processes to connect all those different agencies together. And doing that in roughly a year's time in a very short order, it's just really impressive. They didn't shy away from that challenge, but they took on multiple improvement initiatives across several different dimensions all at once, and it's really, performed quite well. So, it's a great model for technology transformation, not just in courts and justice, but I would say in government around the country.

Rikki Ragland: It's interesting when you start talking about, you know, 55-60% of our court systems as the average citizen, obviously, I'm you know, day to day, not really in a court outside of maybe filing paperwork or serving jury duty, and I'm not really thinking about the technology necessarily that I'm using. So, can you tell us a little bit more about what that average citizen is experiencing when they're interacting with the courts, how am I personally being assisted by Tyler solutions?

Brian McGrath: Well, one is, by not having to think about it at all. I mean, hopefully, the system is efficient and it's operating well such that it's keeping you safe in a way that you're not even thinking about it. But should you need to interact with the system, then we are providing the same ease of access, ease of use for folks that need access to documents that might represent a resolution to a matter or they need to look up a historic document like a will that might have been filed by a family member and making sure that those things are just as easy to access as what you would find in the private sector.

And the other thing that you would experience would be just in your tax dollars. In my home county, which is Collin County, Texas, they've quadrupled in population, in really the last about 5 years, and yet their IT staff has grown zero percent. They've maintained the exact same number of folks managing their IT infrastructure in that jurisdiction. And they're but one of many examples of our clients who have experienced tremendous growth, but they've been able to drive efficiency to where, you know, you're not having to increase the footprint of their dollar spend, if you will, to keep up with that because the technology allows them to advance so well. So those are just a few different examples, and I’m sure we'll touch on more specifics later on.

Rikki Ragland: Well, in addition to the average citizen, why don't we also take a look at attorneys and courtrooms? And if you can also explain how Tyler solutions is really helping to make their jobs look differently now than it did say 10 years ago, especially when it comes to electronic filing for cases.

Brian McGrath: Yeah, electronic filing you know, it's really gone through a transformation in the past 10 years. And just when we talk about electronic filing, we're talking about taking what was a largely I'm talking about paper processes, taking a largely paper-based process, digitizing that, and allowing a digital document to move from person to person to person, participant to participant to participant,, all throughout the criminal justice process to where you're not having to work with that paper anymore.

Today in our systems, across all of those courts, I talked about our breadth across the country, our court users receive about a quarter of a million documents every single day. When that was paper, largely coming from attorneys, some coming from citizens who were trying to navigate the system themselves. When that was coming through paper, it had to be physically stored indefinitely, or at least for a period of time for statutes of limitation. When it needed to be accessed and used or presented in the courtroom, it had to be, you know, pulled from files and wheeled physically into the courtroom. That's where paperclips or staples can come off. Pages can get lost. Water damage can ruin certain things. And even you've got to physically secure that so the people that shouldn't have access to it can't actually see that information, you know, that physical document as it's physically moving from office to office, place to place to place.

What we've done with electronic filing is make that a paperless process, starting with the attorneys. And if we can start there, you know, they're drafting these documents in electronic format and printing them out and having them hand delivered to a court, well, if they're already drafting them electronically, let's continue that electronic process from there with electronic filing. So, we give them choice in terms of the way that they upload those documents, the way we integrate in with the tools and systems they're already using as attorneys. And then masking the complexity of courts and making it easy for them to upload that information and do a hand off effectively, so that the courts can then take that information and progress it from there without breaking that chain of electronic processing, never exiting out to paper.

And the nice thing for attorneys is, you know, previously when they had to interact with a paper process, they could only do so during court hours. And, you know, you could only find a way to get there physically using so many means. Now it's a 24/7 process, and you can do that anytime, anyplace, pretty much anywhere in the world. So, it's really opened things up for attorneys, made it much more convenient for them.

Rikki Ragland: And along those lines of electronic filing, it seems like you could really see the difference obviously when the pandemic hit. So, 2020, court systems, the country, just shutting down. How did that really affect the courts where they weren't doing electronic filing yet? And you weren't able to go into a courtroom and you weren't able to do, you know, paper filing. And then we'll talk about the electronic filing on top of that. But what did that look like for courts who said we have no way of filing electronically?

Brian McGrath: Yeah. Thankfully, most jurisdictions had already switched to some form of electronic filing, by around the 2016 to 2019 timeframe. But there were still some pretty high population jurisdictions, the state of Massachusetts, several others that adopt still a paper-based process. And they have optional electronic filing, but they've yet to make that the common, mandatory means of transferring information back and forth. Other folks who had yet to adopt electronic filing, it wasn't because they didn't want to do so. It's because they had antiquated systems that were their core back end.

And so, what we saw during the pandemic was an acceleration of those folks that made it largely electronic filing largely optional previously. They accelerated their mandate, or mandatory usage of that, and courts that wanted access to that technology accelerated their programs to get their back-office systems modernized so that they could also employ electronic filing.

And I tell you what we've measured is a 49% increase since the start of the pandemic in what we call continuous improvement projects. These are projects that courts and justice agencies take on after they've gone live with a Tyler system. It's an improvement project because they want to drive further efficiency, because going live with the Tyler system just sets the foundation. And so, we saw this this tremendous burst of activity in a variety of areas. 49% increase to be exact around courts just saying, okay, we've got to do more, and that hit, all across the country, largely all at once.

Rikki Ragland: I would imagine too that during the pandemic, not only did we see a lot of the electronic filing, but the virtual courts probably became more accelerated too. Can you talk a little bit about what the virtual courts looked like?

Brian McGrath: Most definitely. Yeah. Virtual courts, which just thinking about virtual courts, you know, that's the idea that I'm not actually driving down and being physically present in a courtroom with a judge or a prosecutor or that particular experience, that was generally a topic at every conference that, you know, I've seen for a decade. And it was adopted in fits and spurts and more academic experiment type modes, but courts could not shut down. Law enforcement could not shut down. Jails can't shut down. The court system could not shut down. And what the pandemic did was just accelerate the adoption of that to where you could no longer afford to experiment with it. It was a must.

And so, we've yet to really see the industry settle on a common technology set or a common usage pattern other than the mindset has shifted from, hey, I think that might be a good idea to we must do this and it's a core element for us. And so just about every jurisdiction I know of has adopted some form of virtual appearance. And now what they're doing is what I would call climbing the complexity ladder. They introduced virtual appearance to predict low complexity matters, like, somebody disputing a traffic ticket, and now they're moving up to things like small claims or multiple attendees or remote appearance from, folks that are in a jail that can appear in a courtroom electronically without having to actually be, you know, driven over, to the courthouse. And so going up that complexity ladder and introducing it more and more and more.

Rikki Ragland: Well, it also seems that with the pandemic, not ending, but with us going back face to face is what I should say, an in person face to face communication.

One of the things that is just a mainstay seems to be our virtual court system. Even though people are returning back in person for courts, in person as well, what do you think the popularity is of remaining with the virtual courts even though we've returned back in person with one another?

Brian McGrath: I think it's a permanent fixture. It wasn't a temporary item. What court saw was a citizenry or a participant expectation level or expectation that what I see the private sector, I deal with virtual meetings all day every day. Why in this particular area do I have to be physically present?

And they also saw the benefits for themselves just for efficiency. So, it's here to stay. There's still a lot of maturation that's needed and for highly complex matters, there's still room and a place for physical presence, but it's a permanent fixture moving forward, it's just more about maturing the technology and being able to take on the breadth of different types of matters that you would be physically present for.

Rikki Ragland: And with our court systems, as we're saying, some are adopting the electronic way of doing virtual courts and electronic filing a little faster than say other court systems.

So how do you think courts will keep up with this innovation?

Brian McGrath: One of the benefits of our courts is they don't compete with each other in this country. They're not, you know, private enterprises, private businesses that compete and there's a lot of great work that's being done, and there's no shame in learning from others and copying what's been done. And there's a tremendous amount of blueprints that are out there that courts can adopt from their peers, and they largely do so.

One of the ways that Tyler assists this is, we produced for the first time, about 10 years ago, what we call our electronic court maturity model. We just launched, I believe it's our fourth version in September of this year that breaks down multiple dimensions of court operations from things like serving citizens, serving attorneys, back-office processing, in court processing, etcetera, and shows you what the capabilities are and the qualities are of different maturity levels of courts in each one of those different segments. And it allows an organization to say, hey, let me map out where I want to be. Where do I want to be today? Where do I want to be 3 years from now in terms of what capabilities I would like? And then given that capability roadmap, who might I learn from to implement that, and they can enact a project plan.

And funny enough, what's interesting is a lot of the courts that are going live with Tyler systems today are higher on that maturity model that maturity level, then courts that went live even 5-10 years ago that have been adding on different capabilities kind of one off over time.

So, we're seeing courts that maybe had more legacy type mainframe systems leapfrog all of their peers on day one as opposed to building up these capabilities over time. So, I mentioned they don't compete with each other as businesses, but we do see, some positive egos that are out there too, so they could take a look at that and kind of compete with each other that way. But it's all healthy, and it's really exciting to see.

Jade Champion: We'll be right back to our conversation.

I hope you're enjoying listening to this episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast.

Court officials understand that technology is critical to their process. Rapidly evolving technologies allow courts to do more than just meet expectations.

And in today's world, virtual justice tools are empowering courts to raise those expectations.

But the question is, how do courts keep up with this evolving technology?

Transformation doesn't happen overnight. And to achieve a successful and sustainable evolution, you need a long-term roadmap that contains knowledge of the past and anticipation of industry needs to come. Check out the white paper linked in our show notes to explore the trends shaping the future of courts and justice technology.

Examples from jurisdictions like the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who are pushing the boundaries and insights to prepare for what's ahead. Now let's get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.

Rikki Ragland: And I know earlier, we talked and touched a little bit about the jury process and saying sometimes the average citizen, the only time they interface with their court system is when they serve on a jury.

When we talk about courts and that maturity, how has that maturity and that digitization of courts really changed our jury process?

Brian McGrath: Well, this is a this is an interesting one because, I mean, as you mentioned, this is largely the only interaction that the general public might have with the court system. And the experience was fairly poor, even dialing it back five-ish years ago. If you think about it, you got a jury summons, it came in a very long paper document multiple pages with information that you needed to fill out by hand and communicate manually and deliver by hand.

And then you only knew because they could only communicate with you through that kind of snail mail slow means. You only knew a day and a time to show up, and so you would show up, and you'd sit in a room with a hundred plus other people and wait to be called upon, all the while figuring out what to do for childcare arrangements or taking time away from work, going through traffic, etcetera. And so that was your experience.

And then at the end of the day, you would be handed a physical check for your time.

And so what we've seen, really, a revolution that started before the pandemic, but accelerated by it, was an idea of saying, let's go down to a much smaller footprint of a postcard It saves postage for the jurisdiction with a QR code on it that allows someone to take a mobile device, go online and fill out information electronically, And now that the court has that information electronically, they can communicate with you electronically, give you updates. If you're not needed that day, they can tell you in a fairly timely manner, and the day of your experience is far richer, because you're not showing up first thing in the morning and waiting around. You're waiting for that text notification to say, hey, show up at 1:30 P.M., and, you know, bypass go and go straight to a courtroom 13A.

And you're there. You're only there for the time that you're needed. And if you need to be released, then you already knew you didn't even need to show up. But it's a lot less time that you're and energy that you're having to extend to be part of that process. And it's even it's easier for the court system too. So, it's a true win win.

Rikki Ragland: You also mentioned too on what I call the olden days, but in the former days where, as we said, we would receive a check for serving on a on a jury, that even looks very different now. Can you talk about Tyler Disbursements and how has that really enabled jurors to get paid in a way that is best for them individually?

Brian McGrath: This is another, you know, pretty exciting development that we've seen courts adopt where if you first just think about the cost, the systemic cost of a paper check, depending on the metrics or the measure, it's between 12 and 15 dollars to produce a physical check. If you think about all the folks that have to calculate it, fill it out, sign it, handed off to a citizen, they go through, they take it over to a bank, somebody's got to process a deposit, etcetera. There's a lot of labor and cost involved in that.

And It's not necessarily sanitary either, in the fact that it's changing so many different hands as well. And so what the disbursement process or the payment process is now through Tyler Disbursements, and the things we're able to do is, in addition to the text notifications and the streamlined communication, when you show up for jury duty, you're given a debit card the moment you arrive, with instructions. And when you leave, all of the payments are automatically calculated and loaded electronically onto that debit card to where you walk out of the courtroom with a card that you can use at any merchant just like you could, any other gift card or credit card.

And if you don't want to use it there, then you can transfer it off of that platform online to any other payment platform that you would like, like a PayPal, for an example, if you wanted to just move that to another platform or even do things like donate it to charity. So, it's really removed the physical processing of those payments, you know, sped up the calculation of it to where it's much more automated and the citizen now has a lot more freedom, especially if they're unbanked or you have other needs to be able to take that and do with it as they please. So, again, lots of great adoption for that really excited to see that take off more and more, throughout the country.

Rikki Ragland: That's terrific, especially with juries when you take a look at who is serving on a jury. It's cross generational now. So that I think is a really great way of that automation, not having to also take that check that's passed through all of those hands. But physically get in your car and drive to a bank to cash that check.

So that really is taking it just leaps and bounds beyond when I, again, years ago, was picked, and it's just so neat to see the evolution of our court system. So, Brian, when we talk about the modernization of our port system, it obviously goes beyond digitizing records or creating alternatives to face-to-face communication.

Much of this modernization also involves that transition to the cloud. What does that look like when it comes to Tyler solutions?

Brian McGrath: Yeah. You know, largely, a lot of things that I've talked about, you'll see echoed as motivators for courts that are adopting cloud technologies or asking Tyler to host and operate their systems, on their behalf. And so, they're facing forces that require them to connect more and more of their systems together to share information, they're facing rising security threats that are much more difficult for them to respond to because the capabilities of threat actors is outstripping folks even in the private sector. And then they're really managing a large electronic footprint as more and more of their manual processes are being done via software and automation.

And so given that courts are asking Tyler to, which now over half of our clients are hosted by Tyler, they're asking Tyler to remove the complexity of managing IT operations such that they can focus their team members on those new capabilities that their citizens or their justice partners or attorneys are asking for. And so, we can centralize that at greater scale, with a greater posture around security, and just really, like I said, freeing up their time to focus on, the efficiency and effectiveness of courts.

Rikki Ragland: Lastly, I just I really want to touch on something that is so popular right now. Everyone's talking about AI.

And what will that look like when it comes to courts and justice? So, you know, AI is it’s changing court automation.

Is Tyler Technologies incorporating AI into the court system or is something that's on the horizon from Tyler when it comes to AI?

Brian McGrath: Yes, to both, AI is the hottest topic in the legal technology space. And it's not surprising, I would imagine for folks to hear that. But, realistically, a lot of what seen with AI, it's a solution in search of a problem.

And folks have used things that are commercially available like ChatGPT and Bard and found those to be whimsical, but not haven't necessarily found a practical use for it, especially when it comes to court operations. And we've seen ideas that range from the absurd to things that are imminent or are pressing today. So, it there's a lot for courts to process. They're going to need policies around originality of evidence They're going to need policies around the language or the use of chat bots, for example, to produce legal documents, legal instruments.

So, they're crafting those today when it comes to Tyler though, there is a practical use and there's something we're employing. And right now, the recent acquisition with a company called CSI, who we've been partnering with for quite some time, and it's really exciting to see what they've done, which is a practical use that mirrors so much of what courts are having to deal with in automating the review of all of those documents that I mentioned previously that are being electronically filed.

Courts are having a heck of a time given the rise of inflation, hiring staff members to review those quarter of a million documents per day. And what CSI's technology brings to the table and what Tyler is now deploying is automating out of the box, at least 25% of the effort that courts were spending in reviewing those documents that were coming through every single day. They can't hire enough people because folks don't actually, you know, they they're not applying for these jobs, like they used to. And so rather than seeking out manual labor, courts are now turning to automation, and so using AI to take a look at a document, learn what that document is, extract the key pieces of information, and then simulate a user to enter that information into Tyler Systems just like a court staff member would.

They can do that. They can do that with the lights off. They can do it 24/7 to mirror exactly what the attorneys are doing. And so that makes that process much, much more efficient and really keeps the more complex items for the experts, the actual court staff.

So, it's a tremendous benefit for them and is a true practical use case for AI in the court space.

Rikki Ragland: It's very interesting to even try it predict I would imagine 3, 5, especially 10 years from now what this automation will look like. It's almost impossible to try to figure out what that would look like.

Brian McGrath: It is, but what we can see on the horizon is taking that automation, the key learnings that we get with millions upon millions of documents, all of that legal language trapped inside those. They're already electronic.

Imagine what we can do when we identify that information in the document, and we can eliminate the manual data entry that is performed all throughout our processes. We can automate those such that court staff are really looking at the data and the effectiveness of process more so than just keying information and transferring it from system to system. So that is a really exciting promise, and we're already seeing the foundation or the building blocks for it today.

Rikki Ragland: Well, Brian, I want to thank you so much for joining us today on the Tyler Tech Podcast. Again, Brian McGrath, President of the Courts & Justice division here at Tyler Technologies.

I know that I have certainly learned a lot about Tyler being on the forefront of C&J solutions. So, thank you.

Brian McGrath: Yeah. Thanks, Rikki. I appreciate it.

Jade Champion: Are you looking to learn more court modernization, or would you like to explore the trends shaping the future of courts and justice technology?

Check out the show notes for more resources including a white paper dedicated to the evolution of an advanced court. Thanks again to Rikki and Brian for sharing the conversation with us. I hope you found it to be informative. If you're enjoying our podcast, please share this episode with your friends, give us a five-star rating and leave us a review. It's the best way to make sure others can discover the Tyler Tech Podcast. For Tyler Technologies, I'm Jake Champion. Thanks for joining us.

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