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State Court Administrative Office outlines multi‑year IT, data and juvenile justice projects
Summary
Trevor Van Dyke and SCAO staff updated the House appropriations subcommittee on multiple work projects including a judicial workload assessment, a statewide case management conversion, a juvenile justice data project, and a court data transparency initiative with multi‑year timelines and federal grant deadlines.
Trevor Van Dyke, deputy general counsel for the Michigan Supreme Court, presented a summary of work projects administered through the State Court Administrative Office (SCAO) and related judiciary entities and answered subcommittee questions.
Van Dyke described a series of multi‑year projects. He said the Judicial Workload Assessment was appropriated $225,000 in fiscal 2023 and that SCAO had requested an additional $275,000 to include court operations staff in the study, which uses a weighted caseload model to estimate judicial and staff needs. "A clear measure of court workload is central to determining how many judicial officers are needed," he said. SCALE was repeatedly referenced in the transcript; the correct statewide administrative body for court work projects is the State Court Administrative Office (SCAO), which administers and coordinates these projects.
Van Dyke said SCAO expects a judicial resource report by the end of the year. He summarized other projects: a Judicial Institute benchbook expected to take three years; a statewide case management conversion intended to reduce the number of disparate local systems and improve online services (he said 54 of 319 trial court locations remain to convert and SCAO anticipated greater clarity on timelines within a year); a Michigan Statewide Court Data Transparency Project with a tentative completion date of Sept. 30, 2028; and a Juvenile Justice Data Management Project funded by federal grants and expected to finish June 30, 2026.
On pretrial risk assessment work, Van Dyke said SCAO contracted with the Crime and Justice Institute on Sept. 12, 2024, to conduct a quantitative and qualitative review and that the project is scheduled to end Sept. 30, 2025. He also said SCAO’s Justice for All self‑help center funding (awarded in May–June 2023) has been disbursed to grantees.
Van Dyke described a judicial security project that contracted with a company called Iron Wall to identify and request removal of personal identifiable information from online resources; that program launched Feb. 10, 2025, and the funds have been obligated and spent. He summarized remaining projects for the Judicial Tenure Commission, the State Appellate Defender Office and the Court of Appeals and indicated those entities could respond to detailed questions.
Committee members asked about the number of self‑help centers statewide and praised SCAO’s work on the juvenile justice package. Van Dyke said he would follow up on the precise count of self‑help centers and confirmed timelines and end‑dates for several federally funded projects that carry statutory or grant reporting deadlines.
The presentation primarily described progress and timelines; no new funding votes were recorded during this segment.
