NEWS — Judge defends court decision on case management system

By Karen Gleason

The 830 Times

County Judge Lewis G. Owens Jr. says he believes commissioners court made the correct decision to “cut the county’s losses” in rejecting a case management system for the county’s courts.

Owens addressed the court’s decision on the Odyssey case management system after criticism from the co-chair of an activist group, who charged the court had “misspent” money on the system.

Owens spoke about the money the county spent on the Odyssey system during the court’s May regular term meeting on May 23.

“There was a citizen’s comment on this two weeks ago, and (the comment was made) that the court has done a really bad job, that we’re spending money (with) no consequences or whatever,” Owens said.

“I will tell you that we had set aside $1.3 million for Odyssey when we first came in in 2019, we asked a bunch of questions and we thought, I personally thought it was the right program. I pushed it real hard, and we began the process of moving over to Odyssey,” the county judge added.

Owens said the county currently uses two different case management systems, one for its county courts and one for its state district courts.

Owens said his opinion of the Odyssey case management system changed when he began to investigate further and learned the county would also need extra “modules” in the program that would nearly double its price tag.

By then, the county had already spent $300,000 in transitioning to Odyssey.

“At that point I brought it back to the court, and we made a decision not to move forward with the program because it was going to cost us between $700,000 and $1 million more to continue with the program, and at that point, you either continue with it and pay more money annually than what you’re paying on the two programs you have now, and not be happy, or you cut your losses at $300,000,” Owens said.

Owens said the county is still looking to consolidate under a single case management system.

“We are looking into which system we would go with because it makes sense to go with one system. Our JPs (justices of the peace) and our county (court-at-law) side has eDoc, and our district (court) side has iDocket, so it would make sense to go to one case management system so they can communicate and look at the work the others are doing,” Owens said.

“So, like I said, the comment was made that we just threw money away. It wasn’t like that. When we got into the weeds on it and started looking at it, you either spend $1 million more to purchase it and spend more money on it annually, or you cut your losses, and nothing made more sense than to cut our losses versus continuing to throw money at something where you had a group of individuals that were going to be using it that did not like it,” Owens said.

After he finished his presentation, Owens asked if there were any questions, and there were none.

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