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PROPOSED CONTRACT
Department(s): Office of the Public Guardian, Circuit Court of Cook County
Vendor: Journal Technologies, Inc, Los Angeles, California
Request: Authorization for the Chief Procurement Officer to enter into and execute
Good(s) or Service(s): Juvenile Client Case Management System
Contract Value: $3,405,411.00
Contract period: 5/1/2025 - 4/30/2030, with two (2) one-year renewal options
Contract Utilization: The vendor has met the Minority- and Women-owned Business Enterprise Ordinance via: Direct participation and partial MWBE waiver.
Potential Fiscal Year Budget Impact: FY 2025 $770,000.00, FY 2026 $1,135,120.00, FY 2027 $489,213.00, FY 2028 $499,989.00, FY 2029 $511,089.00,
Accounts: 11620.1305.21120.560225. (Capital Project), 11100.1305.35320.540130 (Maintenance and Subscriptions).
Contract Number(s): 2210-05241
Summary: The Cook County Public Guardian is appointed by the Chief Judge of Cook County Court System to manage the Cook County Office of the Public Guardian. The Public Guardian is responsible for providing legal representation to various at-risk populations, including: (i) juveniles whom the State believes were abused or neglected by their parents or guardians; (ii) adults with disabilities who have been victims of fraud/abuse/etc., and (iii) children of parents involved in complex divorce/child custody proceedings. This proposed contract is for a case management system in the Juvenile Division of the Office of the Cook County Public Guardian (OPG).
By statute, every child who is the subject of abuse or neglect proceedings in Illinois must be appointed counsel for all stages of that proceeding (705 ILCS 405/1-5, 2-17). The Public Guardian (OPG) represents approximately 6,000 abused / neglected children. Most of these children are in the custody or guardianship of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Service (DCFS). The Public Guardian represents these children in the Circuit Court, Illinois Appellate Courts, Federal Courts, DCSF administrative hearings, education and school matters, and other proceedings. In this capacity, OPG commonly assumes an active role in overseeing the general welfare of the juvenile. The Public Guardian is ethically required to maintain confidentiality with its child clients, and it is legally required to securely maintain files and records regarding its clients and their cases.
Historically and presently, the OPG’s legal case management system in the Juvenile Division is a disaggregated collection of paper files, ancillary IT systems (i.e., AS400 mainframe and various MS Access DBs), email records and other loosely structured digital files (i.e., MS Office, .pdf and similar files stored amongst shared file servers, SharePoint sites, MS Teams collaborations, and end user document folders, etc.). The policies and practices to maintain these systems range from formal to casual. Commonly, no one among these information systems functions as a “single source of truth” for a given case. By tradition and according to historical agency policy, the paper files are typically the most comprehensive source of information on Juvenile cases, but these files vary in structure and content and are only comprehensive to the extent that strained OPG resources are available to maintain them.
OPG staff successfully service their child clients with this hodgepodge of standalone data systems, but it comes at considerable cost, effort, risk and lost opportunity. Problems include micro-inefficiencies for the agency personnel, which in aggregate create frustration for employees as well as considerable general inefficiency for the agency. Examples include: (1) common data elements (such as client name, case number, dates) are manually typed/retyped/mistyped/fixed across all forms, communications, documents, and systems; (2) calendars are redundantly maintained (e.g., docket a meeting occurrence in a case log as well as create/save the event in end users’ personal calendars); (3) Staff endlessly organize and/or print emails to ensure that vital correspondence is accessible for future reference and appropriately acted upon; (4) workflow / task assignment is manually managed via email and interpersonal communications; (5) many documents are created from scratch, instead of from agency templates; (6) incalculable hours are expended acquiring/printing/filing/sharing physical files; (7) any instance where case files/data/information needs to be shared requires labor intensive back/forth correspondence and manual file exchange; (8) Operational standards/policies are labor-intensive to promulgate and difficult to readily comply with. As a result, there is a proliferation of varying forms, reports, and practices; (9) Management has limited insight into work allocation and vital statistics, so oversight and reporting are highly manual endeavors.
Management must constantly weigh the importance of acquiring answers to basic business/case questions, knowing that often the only way to acquire necessary information is to interrupt the high-pressure daily activities of attorneys and staff. Knowledge management is stifled, as valuable information is not readily available. Closely related, this inhibits satisfactory adoption of best tools and adherence to leading practices. Staff bearing these inefficiencies include those staff whose primary responsibility is communication with juvenile clients and analysis of these clients well-being, e.g., case workers and attorneys. As a result, time that could be spent directly on agency core mission services is consumed by administrative work. Upon case closure, the physical case files are moved to an off-site storage. This is done so that closed case files can be maintained with limited risk to current clients’ confidentiality and to ensure sufficient physical space is available at OPG offices for newer physical case files. OPG must later eventually destroy the oldest physical case files. These practices are time-consuming and costly, and results in no practical means of accessing closed case files, to the extent that historic files have not yet been destroyed.
The vendor, Journal Technologies, Inc., will create and sustain a new legal case management system to support the OPG’s Juvenile Division. This new system will help OPG achieve optimal litigation of its juvenile cases and enable more effective management of information related to general client wellness. This new system shall enable primary system users (e.g., OPG attorneys, paralegals, and other staff) to store and maintain all data and files related to cases and clients, such as case parties, in-court events / dockets, out-of-court activities (such as residency/placement, enrollment in support service programs, etc.), various court case attributes (e.g., type, status, and outcome), internal OPG processes (e.g., investigations, interviews, evidence collection), etc. In short, enable digital management of its individual cases and clients. The system will provide a comprehensive suite of productivity tools for system users, enabling them to optimally manage documents, contacts, calendars, deadlines, tasks, requests, internal workflows, etc. This shall enable digital case record management without unduly burdening OPG users, while generally improving the productivity of OPG line staff. The system will also enable OPG management to create and maintain case data (e.g., current/historic caseload among staff, case status, case outcomes, etc.) and to create related reports. Such reports will serve a wide variety of management purposes, including but not limited to: general internal agency management, reporting to external stakeholders, and readily identifying critical items (e.g., unassigned cases, cases with various alerts/flags, etc.).
This contract is awarded through Request for Proposals (RFP) procedures in accordance with Cook County Procurement Code. Journal Technologies was selected based on established evaluation criteria.
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