Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Jworx Implementation topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Berrien County officials report lingering JWorx post‑go‑live problems and an 11‑month backlog in law‑enforcement reporting
Summary
County court and clerk staff told commissioners JWorx phase‑2 go‑live has produced ongoing interface, reporting and staffing problems; the county said manual workarounds continue while awaiting vendor patches and state interface completion, and staff warned of public‑safety risk from delayed reporting to state law‑enforcement databases.
County court and clerk staff updated the Berrien County Board of Commissioners on May 11 about continuing problems after the April 2024 phase‑2 go‑live of the JWorx court case management system.
Carrie Smitanka Haney and other court administrators described multiple technical and operational challenges that persist a year after go‑live, including incomplete interfaces to other systems, manual reporting burdens tied to Clean Slate and new reporting rules, and a backlog in reporting to the state criminal history/LEIN systems.
"Our application interface implementations continue to be an ongoing project that Chris, I, and the JWorx administration team spend a significant amount of time on with the vendor," Haney said. She told commissioners that judicial reporting to the state and some vendor interfaces still require manual work and that a vendor patch is needed before an automated exchange with the state can move into production. "We're staged to start dumping things once this patch is in place," she said.
Staff said the county's "lean reporting" (criminal history reporting) work is behind; one presenter said, "I think I'm up to June right now," referring to the date through which entries have been processed. Commissioners and staff characterized the backlog as nearly a year in places and warned of risk to first responders and the public when law‑enforcement databases are not current.
Court staff attributed some of the increased manual work to a combination of factors: Clean Slate legislation that requires file changes and removals, Supreme Court rule changes limiting personal identifying information in online case records, and criminal‑justice reform packages enacted since 2019 that increased the number of manual touches on case files. Staff also described the county court system's operational uniqueness as a unified trial court (district, probate and circuit divisions operating as divisions of one court), which complicates configuration in off‑the‑shelf software.
Staff reported ongoing mitigations: weekly meetings with the vendor and state, manual reporting where required, creation of data standards documents, and repeated custom report development. They said more staffing is needed. "All three of our departments are experiencing the need for additional staff," Haney said, noting that many tasks require experienced personnel and that some knowledge resides with only one or two employees.
County officials said they have run test exchanges with the state and that an Equivant vendor patch on the production server is the immediate gating item for automated reporting. The county emphasized it continues to press the vendor and the state and that progress has accelerated in recent months, but staff did not provide a firm completion date.
No formal action was taken; the briefing was informational. Commissioners asked staff to continue pursuing vendor fixes, to keep law‑enforcement partners informed and to return with further status updates.
