Employees of the Clerk of the Superior Court spent the first weekend of summer at work. Their job was to complete a transition to a new case management system called the Arizona Judicial Automated Case System (AJACS).

(Use arrows above to view more photos)

The Arizona Supreme Court wants to modernize the court system and has begun deploying AJACS to all superior courts in the state, said Clerk Juan Pablo Guzman.

“It’s a big step for us,” Guzman said. “We’ve been working day and night and weekends to get everything prepared,”

Months ago, his staff began cleaning thousands of court records. In June, they completed two weeks of training from the Arizona Supreme Court, Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) and AMCAD (American Cadestre, LLC), the company that developed the system.

AJACS replaces the old AZTEC system, in use since the early 1990s, Guzman said. Santa Cruz County is the sixth of 13 superior courts to make the transition. Next year, AJACS will be deployed to the remaining superior courts and municipal and justice courts in the state.

In a press conference on June 23, AOC and AMCAD representatives and Superior Court Judge James Soto praised AJACS.

“The state can now move toward a single data system to integrate with other agencies involved in criminal justice,” said Renny Rapier, IT program manager for AOC.

This would mean agencies such as the Sheriff’s Office, the Department of Public Safety and Department of Corrections could share some of the data. Rapier said. “AZTEC could not do that (data sharing).”

Certain data, such as Social Security numbers, will be encrypted, said Alex McCall, project manager with AMCAD.

AJACS will enable the courts to advance an initiative to file casework electronically, Rapier said.

When e-filing takes effect in the future, a law office will be able to prepare a case and send it electronically to the Superior Court, Soto said. Citizens who use the courts may file paperwork electronically and pay fees online, he predicted.

“It saves the individual time and money because they don’t have to come to the courthouse,” Soto said.

With AJACS, clerk’s employees will no longer have to manually type checks, orders and motions, McCall said. “This system will automatically produce those documents.”

Guzman likes the built-in accounting system that includes a general ledger, he said.

Who pays?

The Arizona Supreme Court bears most of the cost of contracting with AMCAD and training local court employees, Rapier said.

Locally, “we had to buy some printers and upgrade our system with Excel,” and pay overtime for staff to prepare for the changeover, Guzman said.

June 18 was the last day the office used the AZTEC system, Guzman said. On June 19, employees processed everything manually. At 4:45 p.m. June 21, “we slipped from a test mode to a production mode (with AJACS),” he said.

A dozen problems came up during the system tests, but only two were unresolved when the system went live on June 22, Guzman said.

Santa Cruz County made a smoother transition than the five other superior courts that went to AJACS, Rapier said. “To have only two defects or issues come out of a conversion weekend is absolutely unheard of.”