The future... and it works

Criminal defence lawyers are not generally known as the most IT-literate section of the profession. Developments at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), however, could make it worth their while to add to their skills on that front.

About to embark on phase 2 of a three-stage rollout of its Future Office System (FOS) project, COPFS is in the process of a major leap forward in working methods. How far defence agents can interact with the system to increase their own efficiency will to some extent lie in their own hands.

FOS has been in development since 2000, when COPFS, with their longstanding software development partners Anite Scotland, embarked on a mission to revolutionise the way in which cases are processed through the criminal justice system, based on introducing an automated approach to case handling.

FOS now impacts on over 1,300 staff in the 43 procurator fiscal offices throughout Scotland, and indirectly on all other areas of the criminal justice community. It forms only part – albeit a very significant part – of the wider ISCJIS project (Integration of Scottish Criminal Justice Information Systems). “The FOS project provides entry points for data from external agencies and has the functionality to generate forms, reports and messages back to agencies such as Scottish Court Service, Scottish Criminal Record Office, etc”, explains Walter Ferguson, Director of IT and Estates at COPFS and one of the core team behind the project.

A cultural revolution

Built around electronic workflow and document management technology (Windows based, to keep training needs to a minimum), FOS cuts down significantly on paper files, enables cases to be instantly located in a central database and even permits imbalances in workload between different offices to be evened out.

“With over 305,000 criminal cases and 14,000 sudden deaths per year in Scotland, COPFS legal and administration staff traditionally spent a significant amount of time processing cases in paper based format, to challenging timescales and with little margin for error”, comments John Logue, Head of the Business Improvement and Innovation Unit at COPFS. “The project has necessitated a huge business and cultural change, which our staff have embraced, and a close working relationship between the project teams from both Anite and COPFS, in order to standardise complex business processes and design the system. Initial feedback from the rollout of phase 1 has been very encouraging.”

Phase 1, fully operational last June, now enables deputes to mark all cases online. Phase 2, which starts coming on stream later this year, will permit the processing of all summary prosecutions right through to trial. On present plans, by the beginning of 2007 all solemn cases will have followed suit under phase 3.

Even on the case marking phase some impressive efficiency gains have been achieved. All police reports are now received digitally. “Before FOS, each one would have been printed out before being assigned to a depute for marking”, says Ferguson. “Now every report is loaded into the system and read on screen. Only those marked for prosecution are printed off – eliminating the 40% where a warning letter or other alternative to prosecution is chosen, or that are marked ‘no pro’.”

Managing the process

The program itself provides a logical series of options on logging in. The first thing you see is a series of “in trays” separately identifying, for example custody cases so these can be given priority. Cases can then be listed by date, or individual, or category of offence, simply by clicking on the appropriate column, as with an email inbox. Every type of offence has its own code number – about 70 in all. As well as assisting statistics gathering, it also makes it easy to assign the less serious types of offence to more junior deputes. An audit facility permits work to be spot checked using the same tools.

Although a single database covers the whole country, security means that the passwords of those working in a local office only give access to cases marked as belonging to that office. More senior fiscals might be able to view cases falling within an area office, but only a few have access to the entire database.

“Accurate and timely management information is essential in ensuring continued business improvement and sustained levels of service delivery”, John Logue points out. “In particular, information about the status of cases against pre-defined targets can be extracted.”

FOS also has the mechanism to highlight, and deal with, any bottlenecks in the system. If one office has a rush of work, selected staff elsewhere can be permitted to access cases from that office until the difficulty is over. Previously, either staff would have to have been transferred from one office to another, or else files would have been physically transported.

“It’s become much easier to manage the work since Phase 1 went live”, says John Logue. “We can process cases faster, and get them into court quicker. Gone are the days of paper files or printouts having to go round different desks and maybe getting mislaid.”

“Because the process is controlled by the system, there are fewer errors”, Walter Ferguson adds. “It’s harder to forget something.”

Step changes

For each chosen step for a case, the program sets out the relevant options. Thus the system can keep up with changes to procedure by programming in different options. When a depute wants to send a letter or other document, the system creates the document from styles held, inserts personal details from the case file, and when these have been checked and approved it adds the document to the file and instructs its printing. Again for efficiency, the most common documents are printed and sent out from a central facility in Glasgow.

“Staff can be confident that duplication of data has been eliminated and that case data are consistently up-to-date”, says Walter Ferguson. That will be needed particularly when phase 2 goes live later this year.

He likes to think of the whole system as akin to a model railway. “The police begin a case on their database and send it down the line to us. We mark it and send it on to the court. The court has connections to SCRO, and so on.” Again the system is sufficiently integrated that any order made by the court is recorded and instantly accessible to the fiscal concerned.

In England, by contrast, a single massive database combining all the functions of the linked ISCJIS projects is at an earlier stage of development. The two administrations swap notes but given the differences between the legal systems, neither attempts to build on the other’s model.

Phase 3 – High Court cases – is now at the planning stage. Design work is underway and should complete “in the next couple of months”, according to Ferguson. A full specification and costing is then put to the COPFS management board. If the board gives the go-ahead, development will take place in 2005-06, with implementation some time next year. (A decision has yet to be taken as to whether it will be cost-effective to bring appeals within the scheme.)

The system should provide effective support for the new procedures under the Bonomy reforms, including the record of state of preparation required for the preliminary hearing. But the entire system is kept under rolling review and evolves in the light of experience as well as legal changes. Already phase 1 looks different compared with its design at launch, through modifications suggested by users. And “phase 4”, really a revised phase 2, will accommodate any summary procedure changes following the McInnes Report.

Dealing with the defence

So where does all this impact on the defence solicitor? Having guaranteed access to the latest papers on a case at any stage of its history will obviously help a depute to answer queries from agents, and be better prepared for court. How much more benefit defence solicitors will be able to take from FOS is to an extent up to them, says John Logue. “We’re in consultation with the Law Society to find out what defence agents want. One possibility is to develop a secure website so agents can obtain papers that way. We would email them to say there are documents awaiting collection, they would log on with a password to view these, download them and use them on screen. It would give them an easier means of communicating back. Disclosure requirements could be met through this system. It’s likely to come at some point in the future anyway.”

With FOS now falling into place, that last point is relevant to any solicitor in practice who hasn’t yet got to grips with the IT revolution.