In July 2016 the ISAC began management of the Iowa County Attorney’s Case Management Project (ICACMP). Currently 55 counties participate in the project and on average five new counties are added each year. The mission of the project is to improve the efficiency of the prosecutor’s office in Iowa. This is accomplished through a variety of avenues.
CONTACT
For ICACMP support or inquiries about the program please contact icacmpsupport@iowacounties.org at 515-244-7181.
PROLAW
Prolaw is a legal case management software that provides customizable document templates, contact management, integration with Microsoft Office and Adobe, and much more! In addition to this functionality, the software has been customized to meet the needs of Iowa’s criminal justice processes. One of the most impressive features of this software is shared file access for all users at any time. Allowing all users access to cases is essential when managing the large and varied caseloads that the majority of County Attorneys have as well as collection of court debt. Another important feature is the potential for offices to go completely paperless. Going paperless has some powerful cost savings attached to it particularly with regard to office and storage space.
PROSECUTORbyKARPEL (PbK)
PROSECUTORbyKARPEL (PbK) is a cloud-based case management system that utilizes an easy to use graphical user interface. This program allows you to work 24/7 anywhere in the world that you have internet access. PbK is built with the latest Microsoft and SQL technologies that allow you to streamline your daily workload by creating documents, docketing court dates, keeping track of contacts and integrating with your calendar. PbK comes with more than 200 predefined reports that are categorized by function such as Attorney, Court schedule, Grand Jury, Sentencing, Statistics, Financial, Victim Services, VOCA Grant, Attorney case load and Evidence Tracking. Additional customized reports can be built to accommodate any office’s needs. One of the greatest time and cost saving aspects to PbK is the E-Discovery feature which allows you to send all discovery seamlessly in a zip file by email to defense counsel directly out of PbK. The software also offers the Law Enforcement Portal which allows law enforcement agencies to submit reports, photographs, audio files, video files, etc. directly into the case without leaving their office and allows prosecuting attorney office staff to email officers directly out of PbK asking them to submit items into specific cases. This software has been customized to meet the needs of the Iowa criminal justice process and includes all charge codes and jury instructions.
Counties that join the Iowa County Attorney’s Case Management Project with either Prolaw or PROSECUTORbyKARPEL receive discounted pricing for the software and intensive support that includes:
CHARGING TABLE
This project is responsible for the management of a charging table that contains statutes and wording for all Iowa criminal code statutes. This is a large undertaking as the table is updated each time a statute has been redacted or enacted to ensure that members have the most up to date and accurate charging language within Prolaw. In addition, many other criminal justice agencies and data exchanges utilize this table to exchange charge data in a consistent manner across all systems.
DATA EXCHANGES
ICACMP has been instrumental in developing and prioritizing data exchanges with the various criminal justice components across the state. The fees paid by the member counties defrays the cost of implementing data exchanges because of the consistency of the database among the member counties, and have been crucial to decreasing data entry by County Attorney staff. These exchanges also increase efficiency and accuracy as they are in real time in most cases.
- Charge Code Exchange: every time the online charge code table is updated the database in PbK or Prolaw will automatically be updated in real time. This allows for all new charges, repealed charges, etc to be updated in one central location and that information pushed out to all project members.
- Complaint/Court Notice Exchange:
- Option 1: Counties can choose to have new complaints filed by law enforcement come directly into PbK or Prolaw for review by the County Attorney before submission to the Clerk of Court. With this option information such as Defendants full name, DOB, Address, DL number, SS#, date and location of offense, arresting officer/agency and arrest charges will automatically populate into the case file.
- Option 2: Counties can choose to have the complaint filed directly with the Clerk of Court and populate the case into PbK or Prolaw once it is accepted by the Clerk of Court. With this option information such as assigned Court case number, Defendants full name, DOB, Address, DL number, SS#, date and location of offense, arresting officer/agency, and arrest charges, will automatically populate into the case file.
- Hearing Order Exchange: every tine a new hearing date for a case is added to the Courts scheduler it will automatically be added to the Hearings section of PbK or Prolaw. When the Clerk of Court marks a hearing complete on the court side it will also mark it complete in PbK or Prolaw.
- Victim Exchange: when a case is complete and the Defendant is sentenced to either supervised probation or prison the County Attorney can send victim contact information directly to the Department of Corrections. This allows DOC to keep contact information for registered victims updated in their systems so they can contact them during the duration the Defendant is under their supervision. This also triggers the DOC to look for any no contact order that is valid in a case for victims as that is noted in the information provided to DOC. At anytime the County Attorney receives updated information on a victim they can resubmit through the exchange to help ensure DOC has the most up to date information available.
- Up and coming exchanges:
- E-filing directly out of PbK or Prolaw into EDMS.
- Importing of files stamped documents from EDMS back into PbK or Prolaw.