Their slow progress at chipping away at the huge backlog of cases amassed during the pandemic has been the topic of severaldata from the Office of Court Administration, an arm of the Texas judicial branch, showed the backlog was leveling off.But has that progress continued? Who knows. For nearly a year Dallas County has not been reporting this important court data to the Office of Court Administration every month as required.
The problem, rooted in the migration of case files from the county’s 40-year-old Forvus database to Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey system, has caused many other problems, too,Dallas County District Clerk Felicia Pitre provided us some hope last week, however. She told us in an email that her office, Tyler and the county IT department have been “meeting daily” and have corrected “thousands of errors” discovered in the conversion between the two systems.
That conversion was completed Thursday, she said, and she expects to begin sending felony court data to the Office of Court Administration this week. Even better, she said the county will also soon be able to comply with a new state law requiring her to provide detailed information on the activities of each court specifically, including the number of jury trials held, continuances granted, plea agreements approved and use of visiting judges.
That’s good news to Alejandra Pena, the Office of Court Administration’s director of data and research, who told us her office is eager to receive this information and incorporate it into its 2023 annual statistical report of the Texas judiciary. That report has been held up in part because of the lack of data from Dallas County, the second largest court system in the state, she said.It’s also good news for all of us, whether we realize it or not.