A reconfiguration of the Riverside County Superior Court’s online services portal ran into major stumbling blocks this week, stymieing members of the public, defense attorneys and prosecutors, raising concerns about when the site might be workable again.
Beginning last Friday afternoon and continuing through the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, the site’s search and pay services went offline for a planned overhaul, changing the interface in order to consolidate the case management system for the criminal, civil and probate divisions, which had previously been accessible separately.
The site was delayed returning to active status at the scheduled time Tuesday morning, with an “under maintenance” message showing until late that afternoon. However, even after the portal returned to functionality, some of the pages remained virtually inaccessible.
Attempts to search single criminal and civil cases resulted in delays of 20 to 30 minutes — or time-outs of sessions that forced users to start over again completely. As of Friday afternoon, the same hang-ups were confronting attorneys and the general public alike.
“The implementation of the court’s new case management system has certainly been less than ideal and has created a number of issues for our office and the courts,” Riverside County Public Defender Steve Harmon told City News Service. “This is a moment that calls for patience and creative solutions. We are doing all we can to be of help.”
Superior Court Executive Office spokesman Travis Trapp told CNS that court administrators are “in constant communication with the vendor regarding progress towards a resolution” of the deficiencies.
“(We have) impressed upon the vendor the significant impacts of the current performance issues,” Trapp said. “The court will continue to work with the vendor to resolve the issues until its expectations regarding portal performance are met. Resolving the challenges relating to the portal is currently the highest-priority issue the vendor is working on.”
He said Los Angeles-based Journal Technologies Inc. was the entity the court hired, going back to May 2016, for implementation of the sweeping modifications, at a total cost of $575,000 in state funds.
Beta testing on the reconstituted case management system began in August and continued until the time of the changeover this week, and data “indicated that the portal showed no performance issues,” according to Trapp.
“Our firm has attempted to use the Riverside County Superior Court website on multiple occasions over the past week,” attorney Elan Zektser, partner with Los Angeles-based Oakwood Legal Group, told CNS. “To say it was frustrating is an understatement. It’s unclear to us why they had to change the user-friendly way of doing business, but regardless of the reason, they really made life difficult on employees of our firm and victims of crime in that county.”
Media organizations trying to track down the status of cases have resorted to seeking assistance from the District Attorney’s Office, but despite having password-protected access, the agency’s public affairs unit has experienced many of the same problems with the court’s search function as the public.
“We understand that the transition has posed specific challenges for our communications division, particularly in accessing information through the new portal,” D.A.’s office Communications Director Amy McKenzie told CNS. “We are prioritizing ongoing communication with our prosecutors and are ready to assist in ensuring that public inquiries are addressed promptly and effectively.”
She said prosecutors and other staff trying to complete business on the website had encountered “some complexities.”
“We are actively working alongside our partners in the courts to address any issues that arise, ensuring that we adapt our processes effectively,” McKenzie said.
She could not confirm whether prosecutors had returned to hand-delivering filings to the court because of trouble submitting electronically.
Trapp said temporarily shifting the court’s case management processes back to their former condition while the dysfunctions associated with the new system are rectified is not possible.
“The old portal is incompatible with the court’s new case management system, providing limited value,” he said. “The court needed to migrate to a new CMS because its prior CMS was obsolete.”
The court web portal revamp is at least the fourth since the 2000s. However, the prior restarts entailed mostly minor adjustments to fields on the search pages and were seamless. The current one is larger in scale.