On February 8, 2019, Judge Kirk W. Tabbey shared the story and process to launch ODR in 14A District Court. The court launched ODR for traffic tickets in May, 2014. Over time, the court has expanded access for additional case types. Hear from the ODR pioneer, Judge Tabbey.
At the time the court chose to offer this service, no court in the nation had online dispute resolution. Since that time, the court has resolved over 3,000 cases online (traffic tickets, warrants, pleas) and many other courts have launched ODR.
Court-connected ODR interview with Judge Tabbey
ODR Webinar Slides:
Court-Connected Online Dispute Resolution, 2014-present from Court Innovations Inc
ODR Webinar Transcript
Dunrie Greiling, Host:
Welcome everyone from around the state of Michigan, around the nation, and around the world who have tuned in today for Court-Connected Online Dispute Resolution 2014 to the present and in the future with Judge Kirk W. Tabbey from 14A District Court.
Judge Kirk W. Tabbey, 14A District Court:
Hello and welcome everyone. I have no idea what time it is in the UK or in New Zealand right now, but I feel your pain if it’s really early or really, really late and you’re tired. But thank you for joining.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, I’m excited to see people from all over Michigan, all over the U.S., and yeah all over the world. So, thank you and welcome.
Judge Tabbey:
My colleagues, hello, how are you? I’ve seen a lot of you at conferences and I’m glad you’re here.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, thank you everyone for your interest, and I hope we have … I know we will have a great discussion today. So, I want to give you a little bit of introduction to the logistics of today’s webinar. We often get questions about, is the webinar going to be recorded? Are the materials gonna be available? Well, I’m happy to say yes to both, so if you need to refer to these materials, you want to share these with your colleagues, these will be posted for your use on the getmatterhorn website, so please attend to your email. You’ll get a note from Zoom that will give you the coordinates to get back to this and visit this information. So, that is part of our offering today with the webinar, is the reference in the future.
For those of you unfamiliar with Zoom, Zoom offers some nice feedback and conversation mechanisms. So, there is a Q&A widget that you should see on your screen, and when you have a question, please feel free to just drop your question in at any point during the webinar. We are going to save about the last 10 minutes or so to answer those questions, but if it seems like we can fit it in while we go, we’ll also try to do that. So, don’t be shy. Ask your questions.
Judge Tabbey:
The questions are always good to know what people are interested in.
Dunrie Greiling:
Absolutely, yep. We’re here. I’m here to answer any questions, and Judge Tabbey has made himself available, so take advantage of the Q&A widget, yeah. There also is a chat widget too on Zoom. I think if you can put your questions in Q&A, that allows us to sort of click off when we’ve answered them, and then save some if we don’t get to all of them for later. The chat widget is great if you’ve got a problem, but it doesn’t … For whatever reason it doesn’t save in quite the same way that the Q&A does, so please use the Q&A for questions, and use the chat widget if you’re having an issue and you would like to talk to us separately, but less for a question for Judge Tabbey.
Judge Tabbey:
Yep.
Dunrie Greiling:
He’s been involved with legal issues around technology throughout his career, spanning his time as a prosecutor, as a policy maker, and as the judge. So, perhaps it is no surprise that his court was an early adopter of ODR in 2014. In fact, the court is one of the first two courts in the nation to provide Online Dispute Resolution to the public, and it’s really, probably, an arm wrestle between the two. There are two Matterhorn courts that came on at about the same time. So, we can make the argument that you are the first court in the nation.
So for those of you thinking about putting in place ODR in 2019, imagine Judge Tabbey thinking about that in 2014 when there was a little bit less proof in the pudding on this, even though so much potential that we know has already been realized, and there is more to come. So, he’ll talk with us today about that launch, about their motivation, about the history, and outcomes.
So we’re so happy to have you. Thank you so much. So, I thought I would hand it off to you to explain a little bit about where we are in the world in Washtenaw County.
Judge Tabbey:
Sure. The great state of Michigan. We are a peninsula state. We have two major peninsulas surrounded by the great lakes, which is all those purple areas there, the fifth largest freshwater bodies in the world. We’re down in this little corner down there in Washtenaw County. It’s about a 700 square mile area with a separate governance system. I am a state employee, but this is a local government that runs here. And you can see on the right-hand side in the orangish rust color, that’s my district. About 180,000 voters, 80,000 households, something in that range.
And we are the whole county, except for those two white areas that … It’s a separate court with one judge in a square box with a … And I sit there in where that number two is. That’s my little district there. We are very busy in these two districts, 14B and that number two. The rest of it is one, three, and four, which is a lot of cities and towns. We have 26 jurisdictions, different towns, cities, townships, local governance. The other one that says 15th on that side, that’s the city of Ann Arbor. That one we do not have jurisdiction. So, we’re everything in that colored box, and we have about 9 to 10 pretty much agencies, from local to federal agencies, that we deal with, and like I said, 26 different governmental jurisdictions.
Dunrie Greiling:
And you have multiple courthouses.
Judge Tabbey:
Yes. In that area, because it spans such a wide area, we are rather unique in the state that we have one administrative level, but we have four court sites, and only three judges, so we sit in different locations within this area. So, at any given time we could be at four different court sites at any given time. So, we do a lot of back and forth of files and electronic transfers, and we allow payments between all these different court sites, so we’ve been involved in electronic activity to try to ease the workings of the court for some time due to our unique status and our locations.
Dunrie Greiling:
That’s interesting, yeah, how the different locations prepared you for remote court, perhaps. One way to say it.
Judge Tabbey:
Yes. We have one court where we do all our arraignments, but we do those online as well. We were one of the first courts to push all the non-paper, non … All electronic format. So, if you have a jail inmate that you see that has been arraigned, all of the paperwork that goes with it is pushed back and forth electronically in the queue, onetime data entry, and that comes through. So, we’re doing a number of things to try to go paperless. That’s our goal.
Dunrie Greiling:
That’s great. So, before we dig in a little more to the start, the motivation, I want to make sure we define our terms for people who are attending. Not everybody … Oh, ODR is a big topic, and so to make sure you guys know what we mean when we say ODR, we’re gonna refer to this definition. And this definition is from the IJIS Institute Court Component Model Working Group. And many of you know the IJIS Institute, but I’m gonna define my acronyms, and I’m gonna put my glasses on to read it. Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, and it really is about technical services products and solutions for local, tribal, state, federal, public safety, law enforcement, justice, homeland security organizations. So, it’s a national, international body concerned with those things, and so they help us with these definitions. And so, their definition of court-connected ODR, “ODR is a digital space where parties can convene to work out, or attempt to work out, a resolution to their dispute or case.”
Judge Tabbey:
It’s a form of … We call it a cyber court too because even though you’re not actually online at the same time with people, all your communications are literally going in cyberspace, and you actually never see the courtroom. So, this is another aspect of the natural progression from having to come to one spot, do everything, to doing it in virtual space.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah. No, that’s a great addition. And we like to show this photo of a person using her mobile device here because that is how a lot of people are using these systems. Members of the public that is.
Judge Tabbey:
Right.
Dunrie Greiling:
I think most of the court are using computers ’cause they have more they need to see on their screens.
Judge Tabbey:
Yes.
Dunrie Greiling:
But people are using it from mobile devices, small devices, from anywhere
Judge Tabbey:
Yes, and in effect they’re actually in court, as they’re communicating with our staff, they’re communicating directly with magistrate reviews. So, we are expanding our communications this way, so you’re really technically in court while you’re doing this.
Dunrie Greiling:
Expanding the definition of what in court means. I love it.
Judge Tabbey:
It is, yeah.
Dunrie Greiling:
So now, I think this is one of our burning questions, is why did you get started with this? How did this start?
Judge Tabbey:
A lot of my background is way ahead. I was prosecuting computer hackers when I was a prosecutor. I was taking down hackers in the ’90s before there were jpeg video files and picture files. We were teaching people from all over the world how to do search warrants and how to process it. So, I’ve always been on the curve. When I got to be a judge, I saw that we had a need to have a natural progression of the accessibility of courts for people using technology. As this came up, we were doing online payments and other things, but we had a professor, of course, that started this, who happened to have a ticket and wondered, “Can’t we do this online?”
And so, it’s like anything else where you start with a court case, so we started with that and we said, “Well we have your example,” so we all got together and sat down and said, “Why can’t we make this work? Let us figure out a way to have this whole operation that we do in the courtroom online.” So, we had to figure out all of the different aspects of that. What was our operation? How did it work? What were the good things and the bad things about it? And what could we improve on, and how could we make this more effective? So a person could get what they needed without causing them so much grief of having to come to a courtroom and take time out of their day, when they really only wanted a limited amount … In this case, they wanted to try to get a resolution of a case that they could probably get in court without having to come to court. A deal, let’s say. A reduction in their charge if they were deemed to be worthy of a reduction so they didn’t get points on their record was pretty much the standard go, so let’s try to make it work. That’s how we got started.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, I feel like when we talked about this before one of your answers was, “Why not us?,” which is-
Judge Tabbey:
Why not us? Yeah, why not us? Like I said, in my background I always wanted to try to push the edge, so I said, “Why not us? Why can’t we start this?” Of course there’s that same look from everybody, “Why do you want to do this? Everything seems to be working fine,” and I always felt the only answer that I didn’t like when I was the chief at the time was, “Because we’ve always done it this way,” or, “It just won’t work.” I didn’t like those responses because there was always some better way to do things, and I kept seeing how technology was evolving, and I could not understand why this couldn’t apply to us. It seemed like the natural progression. And here it was, a person coming to us saying, “I want to be able to get this without having to come to court to do this,” and I’m thinking, “We are not serving the public. We aren’t doing our job.”
So, he identified a problem, we needed to solve it, and we needed to use technology. So it had to be us, we had to do it. We couldn’t ignore it. He was just as anybody else, their case is important to us. He was lucky enough to be able to be a professor of cloth and know how to come into the courthouse and figure this out, but that shouldn’t be the case for the random average everyday person. So, it started that way. We needed to finish it off right, and when I start a project I complete it. So, here we are. So, why not us? I think we should do it. I think all courts should do this. I think it’s a natural progression.
Dunrie Greiling:
Thank you, Judge. I appreciate that. One of the things I was struck by when we talked earlier was how you approached the problem of getting this started, who you included.
Judge Tabbey:
Sure. We had a number of stakeholders because, you can imagine, if you analyze … Especially court administrators, you are very good at analyzing your process. So, we had to start with that, “What is our process as it exists?” And so we outlined that, and we then looked at what was the outcome that was being sought by the people in the process? And we saw what they wanted, how it was achieved, and so we used prosecutors, we used court staff, we used magistrates, we used judges. We needed all these stakeholders. And of course the main people were the police who were issuing the tickets. We also determined that if this was gonna work, the police also had to be a part of the notification to the public that this even existed.
So, everyone suddenly had new roles, but we started from what it was, we got all the stakeholders there, and we explained it, we got ’em involved personally. We got the proper supervisors, we got the chiefs of police, we had the prosecuting attornys from the local townships and cities, and the state prosecutor explained it. And once they did it, it seemed natural. They all said, “Well of course. This seems to be working. Let’s do it.” And I credit all of them with making this work. It couldn’t have been done without stakeholder cooperation. Everyone should know that. You need to have buy-in from all the people in the process you currently have to make this work, and there’s a lot of folks. …
Dunrie Greiling:
I think one thing that folks who aren’t from Michigan might not recognize on this illustration is the acronym SCAO. I think in different states the Administrative Office of the courts has different acronyms. I think it’s OCA in Texas. It’s AOC in Arizona. So, I know that people often ask, if you need to bring in people at this state level … I’d like to hear how you managed to include them in your process.
Judge Tabbey:
One of the issues that we had, of course, was we are a court. We are … There’s judges that are doing this. For us, we’re state employees, but we are elected officials. We get appointed to run, or we run … So, we are constitutionally sworn in to uphold the law and follow everything, and it’s the Supreme Court, and usually in each state, that comprises the rules for how judges operate, and they have administrative authority, and they can even boot a judge if they’re not doing their job right. They oversee the judiciary. So, we knew that if we started a change like this, this process had to be approved by the administrative people in control through the Supreme Court.
It was a new twist on the old process, and as a result I expected what I heard. They said, “You need a judicial component to this.” This could not be done. This decision to reduce a charge offered by a prosecutor to some level that, say a person goes from a speeding ticket to something that’s a non-speeding offense, no points, and there’s a fine. They get the benefit, it helps them, they pay a fine, but you are affecting the record. What do you do? How do you decide that? The state’s Supreme Court’s Administrative Office said, “You need a judicial review, just like we do in the courtroom where we have a magistrate or a judge listening to what’s going on, recommending, ‘We’d like to reduce this case to this level,’ and then you look at their record and say, ‘Yes I agree. No one is trying to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes. These people have a reasonably good record here and there’s no problem with that.'” So, there had to be a judicial review component.
So, our process, our challenge then was how do we digitize judicial review [crosstalk 00:19:58]? So, that became where we had the stakeholders, we outlined what we thought about when we determined these decisions. That was the challenge. What do you do? So, we came up with lists of charges that prosecutors would reduce a case to, we came up with a general understanding of the types of records that a person have where they would not qualify for this. And nothing’s cast in stone, nothing was hard line written down. I suppose any jurisdiction, it follows a certain way, can develop how they digitize this decision making process, the components of it. But it was still, in the end, a decision made by the magistrate or the judge to grant the request, and then when that was determined, it would go back to the person that asked for it, and they would be said, “Yes you qualify. You pled, this is your charge, this is your fine, you’re all set, and have a nice day.”
o, that was what was needed. That’s the SCAO part. It was the main piece about how we digitize the part of the decision making, which is the scary part for judges, I think. … So, that was a big key. As we go forward in all of these different uses, we are using the decision making authority and power of a court in a new way to reach people and resolve disputes. We still need that component. So, that was a key factor working with Matterhorn in figuring out how we did that, and it was a challenge. We are still working it out as we expand through, but I’m nerdy I guess. It’s fun. I like doing this, but I think it’s an important aspect that when you look at a process, especially administrators, and you put it down on paper, and you can actually see who’s doing what, and who does the recommendations, and how it comes together, it’s rewarding to know that you actually understand that process so thoroughly you can see where the decision’s made, SCAO approved it and said, “Go forth and make it work.” So, we went with it.
Dunrie Greiling:
That’s great. Just for everybody who’s listening and watching, we will get a little bit into that sort of case or workflow at the court level in a moment, but first we’re gonna talk about which case types the court shows and why to start with. And over time you have added a couple, and we’ll talk about that too.
Judge Tabbey:
Yes. I would say this. The main case type was your average citizen who receives a citation for some form of moving violation is probably the highest number of cases in any given court of our nature, of the district court. As you know, the first line, the front line of all courts are the levels that are jurisdictions involving traffic matters, where most people are touching the court. As you can see from the slide, there were civil infractions. 42% were a high number for us. The biggest chunk of our caseloads singularly. We also had a number of misdemeanors that would come out of these cases, but largely three to one in terms of civil infractions. And a lot of people did not get misdemeanors associated with that, just civil infractions.
So, you can look at our caseload and you can see that we were taking on more than half of our caseload with this process. That’s why we chose it because it seemed to us that most people don’t appear in court unless they had to, and they had to come into court, they had to see a magistrate, they had to talk to a police officer, they had to either go for a formal process where you saw a judge, a prosecutor, and all of this activity took time. We had to set up people to come into the courtroom, and these hearings lasted all of maybe 30 seconds.
A minute? And people got what they needed, but boy did that take time. Driving to the court, parking, going through security, waiting your turn on a call, getting the call, you’re in front of a judge for seconds, a minute. You accept the plea, you’re get a payment, and you’re done. So, the actual process was a couple minutes, but to get there was extraordinary how much effort was needed. And so, efficiency’s where, “Wow if we can reduce the amount of staff time, all the scheduling, all the calls, all the paperwork, all the notices, all of these things going on, amount of postage even,” all of these things were considered in the process.
And it’s hard to measure how your staff has a reduced caseload, but if you measure it by how many times somebody in your court touches a file to do something, that’s a good way that we looked at it. And we saw that it greatly reduced the number of touches on this case if we could do it electronically, and of course the number of people walking into a building and dealing with that was significantly reduced. So, that was all in all savings on all different fronts. Somewhat hard to measure, but it was great. And people love this. They were able to do this online, not just pay a ticket, but get a resolution, and the response in public satisfaction was significant. So, we’ll get to that I know, but we were getting win, win, win all the way along as we start the processes.
Dunrie Greiling:
That is great to hear. We do have a question that seems relevant right at this moment. It’s from Robert Wrath and he asks, “Will there be a demo during this session?” I think we’re not gonna demo deeply, but we will talk … Judge Tabbey will take us through a high-level process.
Judge Tabbey:
Yes.
Dunrie Greiling:
That goes through a couple of the introductory screens and the workflow, and hopefully Robert that will answer your underlying question of what you need to see, but if it doesn’t, please chime back in and ask us.
Judge Tabbey:
Yeah, always ready to talk, emails, however you want to do this at a later time, in more detail. If it’s not in … I don’t expect we’ll answer every question thoroughly enough for this, but I will certainly followup with you.
Dunrie Greiling:
Thank you. Thank you for your question. I love that we’re using the Q&A widget. Feel free to keep going, and then Judge Tabbey will take us away-
Judge Tabbey:
Alright.
Dunrie Greiling:
With a little high-level overview of the process.
Judge Tabbey:
Here’s our website. Everyone should have one at some point on your court. As you can see, we are a county, we have our little seal up there. We are a state court operation, but we are funded through the county as well, so that’s why we’re a mixture. So, don’t let that distract you. You can see, if you go to our website, we have this right upfront when you come on, and it’s because the majority of people looking up a court are interested in, “How do I take care of this ticket that I got?” Or, “I have to go to court for this. Where is it? Who do I see? What do I know about it?” So, you need that contact with the people. So, you can see you’ve got a method to do that, and we start right off, Online Resources, we have all of our components there.
And then, we explain it more with Pay a Traffic Ticket or Pay a Misdemeanor Case. That’s part of our new component. Online Misdemeanor Plea, we have. That’s one of our new components. Online Traffic Review, that’s the one where you get a ticket taken care of. Online Warrant Resolution for people that want to resolve a bench warrant, are not sure about coming in, and what needs to be done. That’s another component. So, you can see how we add them into our website in a simple way so people understand what it is they’re looking for, and hopefully that’s simple enough for most people to see and go, “Yes that’s what I need.” That’s how it starts.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, I would like to just quickly add it’s also typically printed in super tiny font on the citation.
Judge Tabbey:
Oh yes.
Dunrie Greiling:
But it might not be as easy to find there.
Judge Tabbey:
Thanks Dunrie, you’re right. One of the reason the police are technically so involved here, of course it’s their tickets. They have to … In most jurisdictions the prosecutors want to know that the police are satisfied with this. We have one department that’s not involved with this, so we have a good control measurement to see how much of their cases end up in our court in a time versus all these other departments. And all these other departments are satisfied, but what happens is you get a traffic ticket from one of these officers and they’ve agreed to either do a separate piece of paper or print it out on a ticket form.
Judge Tabbey:
Whatever your jurisdiction prefers, whatever works for you, how you give initial notice to the person on the side of the road, that’s what you need to do to start and if … The police love this part. “Well, I’ve just given you a ticket,” and of course the person is not happy. Although they say, “But you can get a reduction in your ticket. You have a pretty good driving record from what I see. You can go to court and probably get a online reduction.” Suddenly the traffic stop is not so negative. The person realizes, “Wait maybe there’s a way out. Maybe I can get some benefit from this,” and the police are happy to tell people that. And that’s how it started, and that’s how we needed to do that. So, that took some time to work with the departments. Who wants to give out another piece of paper or reprint all your tickets? But cooperation in the officers that do this really like it, they like being able to tell the people that are stopping that there’s a chance for you to get this resolved without this offense, but something else.
Dunrie Greiling:
You’ve already started talking about this process a little bit in terms of who is involved, and maybe how the case would flow, but if you could tell us … Provide some caller commentary on this flow here.
Judge Tabbey:
I like it, but you start off, like I said, this is part of the caseload we selected because it’s the number one way, we’ve found in our court system, that people touched our dispute resolution process. So, it starts with the citizen and usually the police officer. Then the prosecutor will get involved where a person wanted a formal hearing, so we had to include them now because here we are deciding that a person is going to get the benefit of the police officer’s decision and/or the prosecutor’s decision to reduce a charge, change the ticket from a speeding ticket, say to some impeding traffic or something else.
Judge Tabbey:
So, we had to come up with that and make sure they were a part of it, and so we had to get them onboard, say, “Here’s our process.” And we got them onboard early, we invited in to see, “Do you like this process? Do you not like this? Is there some other way you want it handled?” We had different opinions, we worked it through, and we got eventually everyone onboard with this procedure, which is another thing that the State Court Administrator’s Office wanted us to do. They don’t want some department or agency yelling at them saying, “This isn’t right.” So, you really do need to do your homework and work with all the stakeholders. At this point they also had the judicial component, so we had to look at what are the ranges and categories of charges and offenses, and resolution type charges and offenses that would be used? And therefore it goes from the citizen, gets the ticket, back through the police officer or the prosecutor. We did all of that prior to the online submission.
So, it was set up that if you filed your online submission it was pre-approved for certain things through the prosecutor and the police already. So, they’re not involved in a decision making process at this point, they’ve already made a decision for those qualified. It automatically then threw the citizen into the court system, and when we had notified them, “You’re in the queue. Everything is told, you don’t have to worry about anything happening to your ticket while all this process is going on.” So, there is a process where if they’re admitting responsibility and they don’t want to set a hearing … This was the part. If you want to set a hearing, you can always set a hearing. You can set an informal hearing or a formal hearing. This, you would be taken out of the loop and you would get your dispute resolution in the regular way. This is for somebody that wasn’t disputing the fact that they made an infraction, they’re only trying to seek a reduction so they don’t get hammered with a bad charge.
So, that’s where we come in. We make sure everything’s followed the way we did, and it goes in a queue, it’s a process, it comes up online. This is where Matterhorn comes in, this is what they structured, this is how they helped us do it. So, that’s very Matterhorn intensive here in our process. And it’s review. You see it every day. You have a magistrate or a judge, you call it up, look at your email. You can do this online, you can do it at home. The ease is tremendous. It’s like signing orders from wherever you are. If you’re a judge, you just do it on your phone. So, you can be on vacation and still look at this on a daily basis for a few minutes and make these decisions. So, it’s simple and easy. Thank you, Matterhorn.
Then it goes from there back to the citizen. We tell them, “You have been approved. You’ve already admitted it, but you’re no longer having to pay this. You’re paying … This is now going to be changed to this. Thank you for your payment.” So, we have set it up to where people would admit responsibility and make the payment, and hopefully get the result. And if they didn’t get it, they didn’t get it, but it’s electronic, it’s credit, and of course it’s using a credit card. There’s no way to use a check. You can do PayPal. There’s a lot of ways you can set this up, but it’s resolved and the citizen gets this nice email back or text back saying, “It’s resolved. You have this, you no longer have that. Thank you for everything.” And then, everything comes back to the court to finish it off. So, however you want to set that up, whether you make sure they pay first or later, however you want to do it is up to your process. That’s the flow.
Dunrie Greiling:
That’s the flow. Yeah, I’m seeing a couple questions from folks on exactly how it works. I wonder, maybe we should … One of the questions is, “Do the negotiations occur online?” And I think from Stephen Shields.
Judge Tabbey:
No, there’s not an active online negotiation. That part of the process was resolved prior to the actual person submitting their request. This was what we did behind the scenes. We agreed that there is a range of cases that the prosecutors and the police agencies agree to bring to us that would cover this. So, if for some reason it was outside of that, it would just automatically be denied. If a person says, “Oh I want to plead this down,” they get a ticket that’s really bad and they ask for it, well it would go into the system, we’d say, “No I’m sorry. You’re not going to get that.” And it would go back and you could have a choice, “Well do I want to continue to go forward and do this, or do I want to set up a hearing?”
So anyone could do it, but we had already had those discussions, and those took a while, I agree. But it’s that background where you and everybody as a stakeholder, all your prosecutors and your agencies, to agree that these are the cases, here’s what they’ll be resolved to. And once they’ve done that, you don’t need to go back to them because you know those are always usually the same discussions per case.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah. Thank you, Judge. I want to address that question just a little bit differently. I don’t know. I mean, the person does sort of plead their case online. There’s an opportunity for them to have a statement-
Judge Tabbey:
Right.
Dunrie Greiling:
So the judge or magistrate can review that information.
Judge Tabbey:
Yeah.
Dunrie Greiling:
So, there is that component of it that is maybe unique to each case and does occur online. So, that may be a different twist on it.
Judge Tabbey:
Yeah, what you have is you have to have it set up to where you know whether a person can even qualify for this or not.
Dunrie Greiling:
That’s right, that’s right.
Judge Tabbey:
And that’s what I was explaining. And what Dunrie is added is the piece that is needed for a qualified judicial review. We did the quantitative part. The qualified is, “Do you want to plead responsible with explanation?,” which is a common thing. So, people can make a comment and the magistrate can then, or the judge, can respond back with a, “Yes you didn’t get it because of this, this, and that.” It’s up to you how you want to respond to that, and there is a component for that in the system if you want to do that.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, I changed the slide just a little bit to show where that might happen where they can include that statement. There are two more questions. I know we’re spending a little more time on this.
Judge Tabbey:
Yeah, Request for Review, you see, “Would you like to include a statement? Optional,” You see that right there on the middle piece on your phone, so you can see it’s in there.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, Suzanne Poplin asked, “Is there a time limit for each step?” Back here, I think that there are some times gated by the time for the ticket to have … There’s some times in there.
Judge Tabbey:
There are processing times unique to your own operation. So you have to understand, again, what’s your process now? When you do this, as you know, you might identify you have some parts that are a bad process, parts that need improving, and you don’t want to … The one thing we recognize is you don’t want to digitize or make something online that is a bad process. You want to clean up your process, so if you are running behind somewhere not able to process these in a timely manner, you need to work on that before you start going online with these things. So, I mean that’s just a good way for administrators to take a good hard look at it, but there is … Let’s say there’s an average time it takes for the ticket to be written. If you’re a jurisdiction that uses online tickets like the agencies here do, immediately it can go right into our system, and we have that ticket within the day, or the next day it comes through. Sometimes they’re paper written and it takes longer for it to be processed. We understand that.
So, however it gets into the system that you have … Obviously if it’s online, it’s really sweet. If it’s not, it’s gonna take longer. A person’s gonna go online and they’re not going to see their ticket for a while. But there’s going to be then a time when the ticket is in the system, however your process is, and then we tell you when you’re doing this, it’s up to 10 days that we’ve given it to allow this process to occur. We chose that time because we know that 99% of the time it’ll be resolved before then, so you feel as though you’re getting something quicker than later. If you told them three days and you were always late, that wouldn’t be a good way to do it.
So, we picked a slot time that would work, and although it’s not cast in stone … If something happened, you couldn’t do it, you could go beyond that. But we try to do it as quickly as possible. People want to know what’s going on. But that’s the timelines that we were using. So, it is a quick turnaround for judicial review. And of course the ticket’s on-hold, it’s like when you notify them, “I want to have a hearing,” nothing happens. It’s waiting until the court processes it, sets up a hearing, and sends you a notice. There’s always time there. So, we were within that same timeframe analyzing this as a time it would take for you to even get a court hearing. To get a court hearing, it’ll be a week or 10 days. You’ve got a response for the whole thing in that time or less, so that was the benefit of doing this, so we could cut the times down.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, thank you Judge. We hear longer times to hearing’s scheduling in other jurisdictions, so it can be weeks. So, it can happen a lot faster.
Judge Tabbey:
Yes.
Dunrie Greiling:
I’m gonna … You have such wonderful outcomes, and I hate to give them short shrift, and yet I want to make sure we leave lots of time for questions.
Judge Tabbey:
Sure.
Dunrie Greiling:
So, I’m wondering if we can do a speed round here?
Judge Tabbey:
Sure.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah. So we’ll skip through these, not breakneck speed, but we won’t spend as much time as we might want to on some of your great outcomes. Because I want to make sure we have the last 10 minutes or so for questions to more like what we had before.
Judge Tabbey:
If I could, I sit on our performance measures committee. When we started that 10 years ago, it was like the judges were a target on it, when we were saying, “Judges you have to perform and be analyzed.” But the thing we started with was performance evaluation, was the review by the public as to how well we were doing, and believe me, around the country public satisfaction surveys are high. We showed the legislature and everybody else that people liked us, they liked the court system, they liked the people that worked in the court system. They liked the clerks, they liked the administrators, and we knew that would be the case, and it was not outcome determinative. It was based on how they were treated. So we were able to start that, and they wanted quick analysis. So, we thought we would get a good response on process, but I was surprised at the outcomes.
Dunrie Greiling:
That’s a great segue into some of these outcomes. Oh, this is before the public response, this is just the traction over time.
Judge Tabbey:
Yes.
Dunrie Greiling:
I’m starting … Go ahead.
Judge Tabbey:
That’s a line. It goes up and down, but that shows you it’s a pretty good graph going up, and up, and up in terms of getting more and more decisions made over time.
Dunrie Greiling:
Right. You had that in modules over time and those are listed there on the right. … I’m gonna keep … Whoop. Moving. So, one of the most important things that you were thinking of when you started this, was increasing sort of access to the court.
Judge Tabbey:
Yes. One of the things that I did, on my background, was we wrote … Looked at how courts operate in the State of Michigan in terms of e-filing, electronic filing to begin with. I mean, this is technically an e-filing process. So, you can access it at any time if you have a website and it works this way. So, it did give people 24/7 access online to our system to begin the process. So, they could be working the night shift and not be able to come to court during the day, but here it is 10:00 at night, they’re on their phone, they can handle it, and we’re happy to take it in. You can write the rules however you want for e-filing in your system, what is considered filing, what is not. It’s up to your situation. Our Supreme Court decided those parameters. So, if you file it at 10:00 at night, it’s considered either filed that day or the next morning. It’s however you do it. …
Dunrie Greiling:
Getting into the web analytics of how the system is being used you can see, I’ll do this just ’cause this is more on my end of the world. The Google analytics from the public ODR system for the court, you can see that you might think it’s only the youth, and it is not only the youth. That sort of middle graph shows this spread of age range using the system that’s sort of a representative sample six months out of the … From 2018, and you can also see there’s a range of device types.
Judge Tabbey:
That surprised … When Dunrie showed me that, I really didn’t realize how only a quarter of the people are using their phones. People are still using their desktops.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, so it is interesting. We see a lot of difference jurisdiction to jurisdiction on the mobile usage, so that is interesting to look at. This is access, where people are accessing the court from. And you had an interesting observation when you looked at this.
Judge Tabbey:
Yep. You look at the bubbles here, the little gray dots showing the size of the number of contracts, we’re located in Southeast Michigan where the large blue circle is, but we are on some major freeway hubs, and the line stretching … That big large area in the blue and all that, that’s southeast of Michigan, that’s Detroit area, and a lot of people come through here. We’re in Ann Arbor, so we’re just to the west, but we have a major highway. I-94 goes west line going all the way that way, and we have a couple of roads, that one goes to Lansing and it’s like the 10:00 one, and we have another one going … Yep, and then we have one that’s to the north. That’s I-75 going up toward the thumb that way, yep. And you can see it parallels the roadways where people are getting tickets.
When we have people that have come from the west part of the state and the northern part of the state, and then there’s a lot of snowbirds, so we see Florida, California. So people have come in, they visit, it’s a college town area, they get tickets. They’re from all over the country. Chicago, big, big gray area there. So, we’re helping people that can’t come to court and figure this out, and otherwise would just let their ticket fall. They want to get it resolved, and they’re able to do this without having to come see us. …
Dunrie Greiling:
I think you were talking before about the efficiency in terms of a number of days. That figure up at the top shares that.
Judge Tabbey:
Yep. Yes, so you can see that this is where Matterhorn comes in. They’re very, very efficient at keeping these records. This is very helpful to you and your staff. So, five days. That’s vast. I mean, think about it in your normal turnaround time. Think about that. That’s remarkable. …
Dunrie Greiling:
Customer survey results. People feel it’s timely and easy to use.
Judge Tabbey:
And wouldn’t you like this for all your cases, judges or administrators? 92.8%, 91.1% thinks that this was easy. They agree that it was timely. These are absolutely outstanding numbers for public satisfaction.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, you guys get great, great results. This is-
Judge Tabbey:
As a judge and you have to run for election, or you’re an administrator and you like to talk to your funding unit about how efficient you are, isn’t that a great stat to throw up there on a chart for them?
Dunrie Greiling:
Mm-hmm.
Judge Tabbey:
And this is also for your funding unit. This is a good number.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yep.
Judge Tabbey:
Money coming in.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yep.
Judge Tabbey:
Look at that default rate. Almost non-existent.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah. It’s pretty good.
Judge Tabbey:
Depending on how you set it up, these numbers will vary, but it really helps. ‘Cause these are people that are going to pay that ticket already. You’re making it very easy for them to pay this one way or the other, and you’re giving them great satisfaction, a good touch to the court. It’s saving your staff a lot of work.
Dunrie Greiling:
We did-
Judge Tabbey:
Yep.
Dunrie Greiling:
We did just have a question whether the survey is integrated into the application, and if it does issue automatically, so there’s no extra work.
Judge Tabbey:
It’s part of Matterhorn, it’s part of what they do, and they set this up for you. We needed an online measurement to show it was working, and that was one of the things that SCAO wanted and Matterhorn took care of that for us. We worked it right in. So yes, it’s automatically done. …
Dunrie Greiling:
Here’s that default rate again comparing similar cases handled through ODR and not handled online for 14A.
Judge Tabbey:
Yeah.
Dunrie Greiling:
And then, days to case closure again. And I’m gonna keep pushing us through this unfortunately. There’s so much great numbers, I hate to push through, but you’ve already talked about the customer satisfaction. I’m gonna push through this one too so we can get to the questions. Over 90%, 95-
Judge Tabbey:
Yeah, higher, likely to recommend, understood … People actually understood their case and what was going on. That is a big thing for customer satisfaction and public satisfaction. They know what’s happening.
Dunrie Greiling:
And these are some … There’s an open-ended survey, open-ended question, and so these are some of the things that people choose to share.
Judge Tabbey:
Yeah, you can see that. I like these. And the one saying, “It made it so much easier than taking time off work to go to court.” That’s a big, big change. People want to be able to do this and not have to leave their work to do that, and we’ve made that happen for them. They’ve really appreciated it. …
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, no. You get lots of great feedback.
Judge Tabbey:
We do.
Dunrie Greiling:
There are two questions that I have queued up here as slides, but there’s also questions that have come in that I might want to get to first.
Judge Tabbey:
Sure.
Dunrie Greiling:
So, there’s two that are on the same idea of identity. Dennis Aven and C.J. May both have asked, “Are there concerns about who you’re dealing with on the other end of the online system? Do you know it’s who the ticket holder say? Is there concern that someone other than that ticket holder is the person participating maybe without the EQ’s knowledge or something? What has your approach been, or what has your … What have you seen with respect to sort of identity verification?” This is a very common question that we get.
Judge Tabbey:
Yep, very common question, and when we started off with this question, again, we identified our current process. Ask yourself that same question when you look at a traffic ticket that somebody has signed and mailed in and given you a check. Do you take the time to verify that that was the person? Did you take the time to understand that this is proper? No. So, what we realized was that we didn’t have a process to really verify anything that was done through the mail, at least with the people that we were dealing with. So, it was at that time up to the police officer to identify who we were dealing with and we relied on that. We haven’t changed that reliance in this process. So, we are still doing that. Now, all we’ve done is automate it, so again, when people are worried, “How do I know it’s not some other person?,” well the answer is you don’t for the most part, but you didn’t know it before either.
Judge Tabbey:
And then, at that point what do you do if there’s a problem or a concern? It’s the same thing you did when somebody said, “Somebody’s been using my identity.” When you get an idea like that, you go online to the law enforcement network. I also sit and co-chair our criminal justice information system’s policy board, where we deal with issues of identity theft and people that are being misidentified, and there are ways to flag this so police officers know. So, we didn’t fundamentally change anything about the ID process, although when we do online payments we actually get more assurance as to who we’re dealing with ’cause there’s money crossing the table that we didn’t get before. So, I think it’s actually improved our identity assurance rather than lessened it. So again, you have to step back, look at what you already don’t know about the people you’re dealing with, and then realize that you’re probably getting a better turnout when you’re online, in my opinion. That’s been my experience.
Dunrie Greiling:
No, that’s fair. That’s a great answer. Thank you so much. I have one other question. [Andrea Strasburg 00:56:30] has asked, “Is there a cost to the user for the service, or does the court funding unit pay for the ODR system?”
Judge Tabbey:
We have a process. When we put it in place, we looked at the cost to operate this, to pay for Matterhorn to do all of this, and we incorporate that in the ticket fee. A person was … We understood the fact that they were not having to take time off work, they were not having to come and drive to court, in certain locations they would have had to pay for parking. All of those costs were being saved, so we had a small fee that we added that was approved by the State Court Administrator as part of this process as a court cost and that was automatically added into our fines and costs, and I don’t recall if it’s blacked out so you can see the fee or not, Dunrie. I have to look at that. But yes, it’s incorporated in, so that’s how we pay our way for this to occur. It’s like any other electronic process that you bring in. You either pay user fees to some person that is running the program for you, or however you do that, and so it’s like a user fee that we tied in, and people have never balked at paying it off ’cause they know they’re saving so much by doing this. It’s a small amount.
Dunrie Greiling:
Thank you for that. So, feel free to drop in another question should we not have answered everything. I know we won’t be able to. Any questions that we don’t get to in the last couple of minutes that we have together, we’ll do our best to answer offline.
Judge Tabbey:
What we can do-
Dunrie Greiling:
Go ahead.
Judge Tabbey:
Sorry. What we could do … I’m sorry I interrupted you. What we could do, if you would like, we could do, after this Dunrie, we could set up a walkthrough and post that, like a screen capture process that we could just walk a person through it and they could see all the things that the person sees as we go through, and maybe you could add that. So if you want to do it, I’ll work with you-
Dunrie Greiling:
Great.
Judge Tabbey:
And we’ll have that walkthrough, here’s an actual person walking through this system all the way to the end, and then you’ll have that, like a how-to, if you want. We can do that for the folks here.
Dunrie Greiling:
Great. Thank you for offering that. … We just have a couple of minutes left. Let me ask you, what advice you would give to courts considering ODR?
Judge Tabbey:
We are in transition as courts. We have found that a lot of people don’t like to have to come to court because they don’t like the time it takes from them, they don’t think the courts are as efficient as they can be, they’re finding other ways to resolve disputes, they don’t recognize as we do that we have a lot of builtin safeguards for our decision making process that they lose when they go to other operations, and they’ll eventually discover that those aren’t as efficient.
Judge Tabbey:
We need to keep this in our court system. I guess it’s a competition for the constitutional authority versus non-constitutional authority decision making, and I think we need to move forward, and I would give you the advice to try it, make it work. People are going to be online, they are going to want to handle these things online. There are some things you can’t possibly do online, but most of these things you can, and we’re trying to experiment with the ones we can for the future. The more we do this, the less costs will be, the greater satisfaction will be, and people will actually continue to use our courts for this process. …
Dunrie Greiling:
Wow.
Judge Tabbey:
So, do it.
Dunrie Greiling:
Do it. I love it. Yeah.
Judge Tabbey:
Do it. Go out and do it. That’s the thing. We’ll help you. Get it done.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yes, they’ve led the way. And I want to make sure we remind people of these really great resources that are available from the National Center for State Courts. They talk about some of the experiences that District Court 14A has had. You can read more here, as well as other courts who had been using Online Dispute Resolution, and lots of contacts.
Judge Tabbey:
And my advice also, if you’ve thought of a way that we can do any of this better, we want to hear from you. We are certainly not going to have the market cornered on how the most efficient way to do this, and I am certain that one of you will come up with a way that’s even more efficient and even better that we haven’t thought about.
Dunrie Greiling:
Absolutely.
Judge Tabbey:
So if we all cooperate, we’ll get there. We’ll be better and better.
Dunrie Greiling:
Absolutely. It’s wonderful. That’s a wonderful thought. Two super quick questions. Suzanne Poplin has asked, “Have we added a mediation component to the platform, and have we used it for small claims?” I will say that Matterhorn does these things in other jurisdictions. I do not believe that that is … Judge Tabbey can answer for 14A.
Judge Tabbey:
Yeah, we are moving forward with what we can do in mediations. And you’re talking about either doing it online, or you can actually have people in court, or you’re talking about … There’s different components of using the mediation process, yes. We keep getting more and more ideas, and better ideas to do that. As we all know, small claims are the war zone literally for people who come, and they’re out for blood, and they don’t have any understanding about what the rules of the road are, and once you explain it to ’em they might calm down, they might … You might get a good answer, but it’s a rough docket. And if we can find a way to minimize the hot blood and get these mediation disputes done, we’re going to move forward with it. We do small claims mediation on all of these things to get people talking right now. It’s a more involved personal process, but we can get where we can do more of that online, we are moving forward in that direction.
Dunrie Greiling:
Yeah, yeah. There’s a promising … It’s very promising, isn’t it?
Judge Tabbey:
Yes.
Dunrie Greiling:
I want to thank Judge Tabbey for his time today, his time in preparing, and his taking time out to spend to answer your questions. It’s been wonderful to have this conversation. Thank you so much. I very much appreciate your time, and everyone’s interest, so thank you for attending.
Judge Tabbey:
Thank you. And please contact me at any time with more issues, questions, concerns. I’ll get ’em right back to Dunrie, and she’ll get yours if you contacted her back to me. We’ll figure this out, we’ll keep moving the country forward, and with all of your help we’ll get there and we’ll be making the people satisfied about what we do. Thank you.
Dunrie Greiling:
You’re doing a great job everyone. And I want to invite people to next month. We’re gonna be talking about Court, Community, and Tech Partners – To Remove Barriers to Recovery with ODR, so mark your calendars, and thank you for your time today. And Judge Tabbey’s contact information is here. You can always find us. Thank you, thank you. Have a great rest of your Friday.
Judge Tabbey:
Enjoy!
Dunrie Greiling:
Bye bye.
Judge Tabbey:
Bye bye.
Next Month’s Webinar – Wednesday, March 13, 2pm-3pm ET
Please join us for our next webinar: Court, Community, and Tech Partners – Remove Barriers to Recovery with ODR.
This session covers a collaboration between seven courts in Washtenaw County, Michigan and nonprofits in the recovery community to provide technology to ease barriers to recovery. Clients of substance abuse treatment organizations often experience great difficulty in their recovery efforts due to outstanding legal obligations.
Hear Judah Garber of Washtenaw County Friend of the Court, Lisa Fusik Deputy Court Administrator of the 14A District Court, and Jason Schwartz Clinical Director of Dawn Farm recovery organization share outcomes and lessons learned from their initiative launched in the summer of 2018.
Learn more about ODR with Matterhorn
- See what courts have achieved with Matterhorn
- Hear from the team at 14A district court
- Learn about traffic ODR with Matterhorn