OREM, Utah, Dec. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- DigitalBridge(SM), the leader in protected information sharing technologies and solutions for digital ecosystems, today announced that it is deploying its Digital Warrants(TM) solution in two additional Cook County, Illinois, suburban court districts, following the tremendous success in Cook County Circuit Court District One, Branch Court 29, serving Chicago, and Districts Five and Six. The technology solution promises to transform the judicial process, by allowing critical information to be shared between stakeholders, so justice is dispensed more rapidly, accurately, securely and at dramatically lower taxpayer expense.

Digital Warrants is a solution which makes the manual warrant process electronic. The process, which has typically taken several days and costs over $260 per warrant in Cook County, now takes less than 20 minutes and costs the court only $25 per warrant. In 2005, Cook County Circuit Court reportedly processed approximately 49,000 warrants, costing over $13 million. Through Digital Warrants, expenditures for processing those warrants would have cost merely $1.3 million, a 90 percent reduction in cost to taxpayers.

"We are exceedingly proud of the success of Digital Warrants in Cook County," said Terry Pitts, President and CEO of DigitalBridge. Mr. Pitts added, "The Cook County Circuit Court system is a tremendously busy one and we have been able to help Cook reach a new level of technological innovation through Digital Warrants. We are thrilled to work with the Honorable Clerk Brown and her team to extend this solution throughout their system, helping Cook County Circuit Court meet its citizens' rights to due process and public safety."

"With more than two million court cases handled each year by the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, it is imperative that we continually seek, find and implement innovative ways to more efficiently and effectively serve the citizens of Cook County," said Honorable Dorothy Brown, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County.

"DigitalBridge, and its Digital Warrants solution, has provided another opportunity for us to upgrade and enhance our services. This automation allows our office to further streamline processes and greatly reduce costs. The benefits of this latest innovation to the Clerk's Office, our affiliate law enforcement and justice agencies, and Cook County citizens are tremendous."

The roll-out of the Digital Warrants pilot program was funded with a grant from the National Criminal History Improvement Project (NCHIP), through the United States Department of Justice. The project has integrated the processing of orders of protection, warrants, and wiretap orders in Cook County. The funding has allowed the Clerk of the Court's office to create a Web-based system between its criminal case management system (KRIM) and the information systems of the Chicago Police Department, the Offices of the Cook County State's Attorney, Public Defender, Chief Judge, Sheriff, and Illinois State Police. The automated process ensures the complete, accurate, timely, and secure transfer of information, as well as the ability to exchange documents between agencies, the security of digital signatures on all documents, an electronic audit log to track changes in the status of information, and the ability for authorized users in every agency to access current information about each case.

Perhaps most important, the Digital Warrants solution allows Cook County law enforcement officials to return to fighting crime, rather than spend time and resources carrying warrants to various agency officials for their signatures, expediting the warrant process and saving lives.

To read the complete case study, please visit: http://www.digitalbridge.com/en/us/downloads/dbjust-cs-20081204-01.pdf

About DigitalBridge(SM)

DigitalBridge was founded in 2004, in Orem, Utah, by industry-leading executives from the technology, education, healthcare, justice, and legal industries. DigitalBridge's mission is to build solutions that enable protected information sharing between individuals and organizations involved in simple and complex ecosystems, while protecting the security, privacy, and integrity of the information. DigitalBridge's revolutionary, patent-pending DigitalFusion(TM) platform, incorporating Digital Packet Technology(TM) solutions, is a completely new architecture for managing information in motion. Our solutions provide protected information sharing to digital ecosystems in the education, justice, and healthcare markets. The DigitalBridge solutions interoperate with existing legacy systems without requiring replacement of those systems, allowing authorized users to access the right information, at the right time, in the right context, in a secure and timely manner, from any Web-enabled device. To learn more, please visit: http://www.digitalbridge.com

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About Cook County Circuit Court

Cook County Circuit Court is the second largest unified court system in the world. It processes over 6 million court hearings per year, over 2 million continuances, 6 million inquiries from the public, and over 18 million items of activity that must be entered into its data system daily. The Circuit Court supports more than 400 judges, employs more than 2,300 people, and managed more than 2.4 million case filings last year. The Clerk of the Court is the Honorable Dorothy Brown.

Cook County, Illinois, Circuit Court and DigitalBridge(SM) Transform the Legal

Process: Saving Tremendous Time and Reducing Taxpayer Expenditures by Almost

                                  90 Percent

A Case Study for Strategic Information Technology Transformation & Innovation

                            - EXECUTIVE SUMMARY -

In 2000, the Honorable Dorothy Brown took office as Clerk of the Court of Cook County, Illinois, one of the largest and busiest court systems in the world, and immediately sought to transform the process by which justice was dispensed. In her landmark project, 21st Century Technology Initiative, Clerk Brown undertook one of the most daunting system upgrades imaginable: transforming the manual processes of the unified court system into electronic processes. The project was monumental, considering the sheer size of the Cook County jurisdiction and the volume of citizen requests: over two million cases each year, over six million court hearings per year, over two million continuances, over six million inquiries from the public, 18 million items of activity which have to be entered into their data entry system, and over one-half billion court records in their computer files. The Cook County system, though robust, was tasked with supporting over 400 judges, 2,300 employees in the Clerk's office, and nearly 2.4 million case filings. The Clerk's office also interacts with various other government stakeholders, including the Office of the State's Attorney, with more than 1,700 employees; the Sheriff's office, with over 7,000 employees; the Chicago Police Department, which employs more than 15,000 people; and an additional 129 municipalities, many of which have their own law enforcement personnel. To further complicate the matter, each entity has its own automated system of various manufacturers, ages, and types.

Following a lengthy RFP process, Clerk Brown chose DigitalBridge's Digital Warrants(TM) solution, an information sharing technology that would allow integral parties to share and act on critical personal information in a secured and auditable manner, while ensuring that the over 30 steps in attaining a warrant follow legal due process. The result of the project is astounding: the warrant process that once took several days and cost some $260 per warrant, can now take as little as 20 minutes to process, at a cost of $25 per warrant, reducing the total estimated annual cost from $13 million to just $1.3 million to taxpayers. Equally important, the electronic process frees law enforcement officers from carrying warrants, so they can return to the job of fighting crime.

The challenge Clerk Brown confronted is one which plagues government and business alike everywhere: how can various entities with disparate information systems share critical information to accomplish a task? The typical solution has been to rip out the existing systems and replace them with costlier, new systems that force database conformity and therefore typically fail to properly integrate historical information. DigitalBridge, however, has looked at the problem in its entirety from a different perspective, treating the complete network as one system which revolves around the individual, much like an ecosystem where one entity is the focus around which the ecosystem functions. The unique digital ecosystem technology developed by DigitalBridge recognizes that multiple organizations, entities, or individuals have to successfully share protected information when transacting business with each other. But, rather than force disparate systems to conform to one system, the Digital Packet Technology(TM) solution tracks information about a person, which can be gathered, assessed, acted upon, and shared between various entities across organizational boundaries. The Digital Information Packet(TM) technology ties to various identifying aspects of a person to him or her; allows workflow instructions to travel with the packet; manages governance across organizations; and integrates security, audit, and use rules within the packet itself.

The Digital Packet Technology solution is driven by the DigitalFusion(TM) Platform, which enables the centralized or distributed implementation of a protected information sharing solution. The DigitalFusion Platform is truly innovative and unmatched in the marketplace. The platform allows the Digital Information Packet solutions of DigitalBridge to securely gather data, media, and documents related to a person, place, thing, or event from multiple disparate databases within a digital ecosystem into an intelligent document, legible both to humans and machines.

The result of the Bench Warrant Pilot Project for the Cook County Circuit Court is the most robust and advanced warrant delivery system in the world, with streamlined processes and substantially reduced costs. Yet, perhaps the most invaluable benefit of the program is that law enforcement officials are now free from pushing paperwork and can return to the streets to fight crime.

To read the complete Cook County / DigitalBridge Digital Warrants Pilot Program case study, please visit: http://www.digitalbridge.com/en/us/downloads/dbjust-cs-20081204-01.pdf.

SOURCE DigitalBridge