The Florida Attorney General’s Office Enters the Document Automation Age with SIRE Technologies
Florida is famed for its gorgeous, sandy beaches where palm trees sway in the breeze. However, in recent years, there has been an increasingly prominent feature that has crept onto the landscape of the Sunshine State—unsightly brown boxes!
Thousands upon thousands of boxes filled with millions of documents have become the proverbial fire-breathing dragon for the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) of Florida.
Florida OAG serves the judicial agencies throughout the state as well as being responsible for the enforcement of state consumer protection and antitrust laws and civil prosecution of criminal racketeering. In the area of criminal law, the Attorney General represents the State when individuals appeal their convictions, including capital murder cases. The office also conducts various programs to assist local law enforcement agencies and crime victims and other services.
As such, the OAG is required to manage 250,000 documents every week. The Records Management Unit of the OAG is in charge of storing closed civil and criminal case files and administrative documents, including printed e-mail messages. The unit receives an average of 700 boxes a month, each containing about 1,600 pieces of paper (more than one million pages per month). These boxes are indexed and sent to the State Archives by the OAG for long term storage – regulations require some of these files to be stored up to 25 years or longer.
Challenge:
When a field office of the OAG would require access to a certain case file for additional legal work, the box(es) containing the information on the case would be recalled from the State Archives to the OAG. The requested files would be removed and shipped to the field office. When the work was complete, the files would then be shipped back to the OAG Records Management center where the boxes would be called up again and the files replaced in the boxes, which would then be sent back to the State Archives.
The sheer number of boxes the office acquired is only half the problem - it also cost the OAG a great deal of money to store the boxes of documents. At one point, the OAG had more than 50,000 boxes in the state archives, costing the state more than $10,000 annually to store that many boxes in the off-site warehouse. In addition, each of these documents was “bates stamped” or given a distinct or individualized tracking number by hand. In light of the 12 million documents going through the OAG annually, this alone was a monumental task.
The Florida OAG required a serious change in how they dealt with their document management, and Gonzalez was tasked to find a solution.
Their ultimate needs were to implement a program that enabled the office to:
- Reduce and eventually eliminate archiving and shipping costs
- Improve efficiency by giving attorneys the ability to quickly and easily obtain needed documents
- Increase productivity by eliminating the need to manually search through boxes of paper
- Reduce the risk of incomplete files that may result from misplaced documents
- Improve e-mail management to comply with state law. (State laws specified that e-mails be stored and made available for viewing. Up to this time, the OAG had been printing e-mails and storing in document boxes for retrieval.)
The office issued an Invitation to Negotiate (ITN). Forty vendors showed up for the initial meeting and about 25 ended up submitting proposals regarding how they would help solve the problem. The OAG formed a committee to review the technical aspects of the proposals and to rate the solutions offered. In the end, SIRE Technologies, Inc. (formerly AlphaCorp) was selected.
Solution:
The Florida OAG has implemented several SIRE products that served to solve the issues they were facing. SIRE FileCenter, an electronic document management system (EDMS) enables them to scan and store electronic documents more efficiently than previously. SIRE Technologies also provided a powerful search option for the OAG or any of their 1,100 attorneys to pinpoint and access specific documents in the system.
Currently the OAG has 12 million images scanned into their electronic archive. The majority of the documents are case related (closed cases, and legal briefs), but other documents include information regarding economic crimes, anti-trust, and civil and criminal cases.
SIRE actually wrote a new program for the OAG that uses Lotus Notes to automatically archive and store all the email that goes through the agency. The OAG is now able to save all the text, including original attachments from the emails, in their original formats—it doesn’t matter if the documents are PDF, Word documents, etc. Now, they no longer need to print and store emails in an off-site facility, they can be saved and archived electronically.
Now, any document, once it has been entered into the system, can be instantly called out of the archive, by authorized personnel electronically—as opposed to having it shipped via “snail-mail.” This results in tremendous time and money savings because the agency serves several field offices in cities throughout Florida.
After uploading 12 million documents the OAG didn’t want to lose anything; therefore they duplicated their records. They have expanded the system to 6 terabytes and are working with SIRE to implement a disaster recovery program. The OAG is looking forward to continuing their relationship with SIRE. In fact, the system works so well, that they have decided to expand the SIRE EDMS into two other units, the Victims Compensation Unit of the OAG, and the Medicaid Fraud Unit.
The Victims Compensation Unit not only serves as an advocate for crime victims and victim’s rights, it also administers a compensation program to ensure financial assistance for innocent victims of crime. As part of its responsibility, the division also notifies victims of the status of any appellate decisions regarding their cases.
The Administrative Secretary (Secretary) is responsible for the scanning of incoming documents, whether they are faxes or hard copies, into the automated claim document management system. A major time-saving feature SIRE includes is that incoming faxes can either be scanned into the system, or they can be electronically submitted to the SIRE database for automatic entry into the system.
Because all associated documents are accessible electronically a victim can know, upon request, where they stand in the claim process.
The Third project implemented in OAG was to expand the SIRE EDMS into the Medicaid Fraud Unit.
SIRE EDMS is used for storage and retrieval of Medicaid documents received by the OAG Unit. This capability allows attorneys within and outside of the Unit to view, print and submit documents to the Unit.
The OAG asked SIRE to create an automated electronic “Bates Stamp” software utility that attaches a unique number to each individual document. The automatic electronic Bates Stamp is automatically placed on each page of all documents that are stored within the SIRE system, including both scanned documents and electronic documents such as Word, Excel or others—without automating this process, this would need to be done manually for the 1 million pages a month that go through the OAG. By marking each document with a unique number, the unit is able to better track what they have produced. Numbering documents also helps remember what was previously produced so they do not have to worry whether they inadvertently failed to produce something they were supposed to produce.
Better Outcomes
The Florida Office of the Attorney General has experienced a major transformation in its document management processes. All told, since implementing SIRE Technologies’ Electronic Document Management System, the OAG achieves an annual hard dollar savings of over $660,000, not counting the soft dollar labor savings of having an automated Document Management System.
Since implementing SIRE, the OAG has seen the following outcomes:
- Reduction for the need to access boxes of paper documents pulled in and out of storage facilities—reduced shipping and handling fees for routing paper documents back and forth
- Ability to securely share and deliver documents throughout the 10 Florida OAG offices around the state
- Immediate access to case documents by attorneys throughout the state.
- Automated e-mail management systems that meet legal requirements of the state
- Automated Bates Stamping for case management instead of hand stamping each page of a case
- Customized electronic implementation of records management as the SIRE project grows throughout the organization
- Full Records Management capabilities such as Document Retention Management, Task Management, Workflow Business Process Management
- More productive time for staff to focus on core responsibilities rather than searching for “lost” documents
- Immediate availability of documents (Search and Retrieval)
- An immediate financial savings of $660,000
By implementing electronic content management solutions from SIRE, the Florida Office of the Attorney General is able to handle its document management processes much more efficiently and cost effectively. And Florida’s beaches are as beautiful as ever.
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