The Cass County State’s Attorney’s Office updated the commission Jan. 7 on a multi‑phase digital transformation project and recommended canceling phase 2 after state actors declined to support an integration the county sought.

Project lead Mr. Anderson reported that phase 1 — migrating digital evidence to a new platform — is complete and delivering efficiencies, and that the office is digitizing voluminous paper files as part of phase 3. The difficulty has been phase 2: the office had sought to adopt Prosecutor by Carpel (PBK) as a case‑management tool and to integrate it with county law‑enforcement records (New World) and the state’s systems (Justware/Odyssey/eProsecutor). Anderson said the county has been told by state authorities that integrating PBK with the state systems is not an option at this time.

"If we are not using that system for the entirety of our case management, we will not be provided access to that system," Anderson said, summarizing communications from the attorney general’s office. County staff described three options: full PBK integration (blocked), direct integration with state court tools (also not currently feasible), or a hybrid approach that preserves local efficiency tools while maintaining required state workflows for filing and court initiation.

The commission moved to cancel phase 2 of the county’s original plan and to continue with phase 1 and the file‑digitization approach while pursuing workable interfaces and manual file transfer workarounds as needed. Commissioners discussed and approved sending a formal letter to the attorney general’s office clarifying the county’s position and documenting the county’s efforts to resolve integration challenges.

County staff said the hybrid approach maintains some PBK efficiencies for local attorneys but requires manual steps or alternative workflows to initiate matters into the state court system until a state‑level integration path becomes available.