We have all the county Prosecuting Attorney's files (Criminal, Juvenile, Misdemeanor and Civil) and Assigned Counsel files (same types) in Laserfiche for about 7-8 years. We designed Laserfiche where the master folder is created when they get the police reports/referrals/etc. From there we can create shortcuts for court calendaring, to importing documents from the network (Import Agent), to combining/joining document types into one document (Workflow), to closing the cases so they move to records retention-and even bringing it back to active if a case has been reopened, and so on.
They do have a case management system that an API was created for. It allows them to easily bring up their case and click a button to show all documents in LF related to a particular case. However, using the search capabilities and shortcuts within LF offers similar functionality. The good thing about what we created is, they are moving to a new case management system but we don't have to change much at all with our LF processes.
What we have seen in the L&J community is we are receiving more and more information digitally or it is born digital. It is easier to capture it in a centralized location (Laserfiche) and have attorney's and their assistants all looking/working with the same documents. No more of who has the paper folder or certain documents didn't make it to the folder scenarios. They put sticky notes or tags on documents that sends notifications or sends the document to someone for further reviews. They have capabilities of looking at pictures and listening to video's and sharing those things easily in a live courtroom environment. Also, because we OCR all their documents, they can put a suspect name, address, etc. and search to see if there are similar instances in other cases.
We thought of doing the digitization 'after the fact' but the costs of doing the reverse is print, print, print!
It is/was very hard to take away those paper folders. Our goal was to be able to streamline their business processes, secure the documents better, do public records disclosures quicker, and shrink the space of where the paper documents were stored.
Our PAO Laserfiche Liaison and I would be more than happy to share our experiences and business processes with you.