Ed Hazeldean, President Many times local government entities face unfunded mandates from the upper levels of government—state or federal. Three years ago, the Texas Supreme Court made e-filing of civil and probate cases mandatory and released an implementation schedule for counties based on their population. As a quick response to the court mandate, Local Government Solutions (LGS)—a provider of browser-based information management solutions for county governments—developed an integrated e-filing solution. In contrast to the traditional case filing methods, LGS’s solution enabled documents to be receipted, stored, indexed, or even cataloged electronically and automatically. The company was among the firsts in Texas to have all its customers functioning on an integrated e-filing system. “It is imperative for our clients that we continually research the state and federal legislation in order to stay ahead of the curve and readily implement revisions the moment they are released,” states Ed Hazeldean, the President of LGS.
LGS offers a suite of integrated information management solutions for prosecutors, clerks, administrators, and judges to streamline workflows, simplify processes, and in turn, boost the productivity of county offices. The suite is not only comprehensive but also sequential by its very nature. First in this sequence of solutions is Prosecutor Professional which takes necessary information from both the accused and accuser, filters the data, and transfers it to the prosecutor’s system to help prosecuting attorneys determine whether to file charges. Next, LGS’s core offering—DataPoint—is responsible for court case management for criminal, civil, juvenile, probate, guardianship, and all other cases types. DataPoint manages not only the case flow but all fees and fines assessed by the courts. Beyond that LGS provides records management for marriages, births, deaths, military discharges, as well as property transactions throughout the county.
LGS was among the firsts
in Texas to have all its
customers functioning on an
e-filing system
Furthermore, to help a busy collections office simplify its efforts to recover county revenue, LGS offers Collections Professional comprising payment plan management, daily call tracking, and financial reporting in a user-friendly format. Ultimately, to assist the judges in reducing their workload, an integrated court management solution encompasses felony, misdemeanor, and several other offenses. All these solutions go hand in hand to make sure our clients are entirely satisfied, which is of paramount importance to LGS. “We conduct annual independent customer surveys and gather feedback to clearly understand the levels of satisfaction among our clients; our 19-year average annual customer satisfaction index reached 98.7 percent, with 100 percent customer satisfaction in 2018,” remarks Hazeldean.
LGS engages its technical staff with clients to learn about their business rules as every county functions differently. The company analyses these rules and ensures that its solutions meet the clients’ needs effectively. After installing the solutions on-site or in the cloud, LGS trains clients to implement those solutions efficiently and monitors the transition over a period of ten days. When legislation made it mandatory for information to be shared between the prosecuting and defense attorney on all fronts, LGS saw it as an opportunity to implement a portal that automatically shared this data, privately and securely. The company built its own portal for sharing information, videos, and more instead of resorting to commercially available products. What further differentiates LGS is their Patented Web Toolkit for rapid solutions development, which makes the company’s platform browser-independent and compatible with smartphones as well as tablets.
LGS now plans to expand its product line along with focusing more on hosted solutions. “We have also acquired a large company and are now working toward enabling the customers of that company to smoothly transition to our products,” mentions Hazeldean. LGS is also looking forward to innovating continually by allocating a third of its staff to R&D in addition to compiling all the information that different counties posses and sharing it online.
