With more than 45 courtrooms spread out over nine floors, including 15 civil district, five county civil, 11 family and three probate courts, the Dallas County Court was a self-proclaimed “organized chaos.” It's a familiar story: Litigants coming to the facility were unfamiliar with the flow, and even if they got directions they often didn’t understand them, security queues filled the lobby, and throngs of people milled about and stalled in front of the elevators confused about where to go. 
 
With so many people moving in so many different directions—from litigants to large jury pools on certain days, and others—“it got pretty chaotic,” acknowledges John F. Warren, the Dallas County clerk. Of course, he furthers, visitors would prefer to focus on the reason they came to court, not where they were going. But the reality was they had to “scramble around to find their courtroom, and the result was they were often late to their hearing.”
It seems that litigants actually had been arriving to the courthouse on time, he notes, only to be delayed by wandering lost through the facility, and arriving at the courtroom after the judge had called the case. The judge would award the party present whatever remedy they were seeking, only to find the other party had been on premise. At that point, the judge would attempt to restart the hearing, sometimes only to find out the original party who had been present had left. Therefore, everyone would need to remain until all the parties were reassembled. “We were basically duplicating the entire process and wasting a lot of time,” he explains.
 
Re-holding the hearings was not infrequent. “It was a regular occurrence that was happening four or five times a week,” explains Warren. To address the issue, choosing digital docket displays was “intuitive,” he says, an obvious solution to streamline the process and provide much needed efficiency. In 2014, with plenty of support from the county, commissioners and judges, Dallas County Courts went live with DocketCall displays from Infax.
 
Crowd Control
Now with eight displays located strategically in the lobby, visitors can check screens even before they go through security. “It’s been phenomenal,” believes Warren. “It lowers the stress levels of the litigants, it’s one less thing to worry them. And it serves as crowd control; rather than gather around elevators they know exactly where they are going and they can get there in a timely manner.”
 
DocketCall automatically pulls from the Dallas Courts’ Odyssey case management system (from Tyler Technologies) so that they do not have to engage their IT department, details Warren, so it runs without input from staff, freeing them up to concentrate on other duties. Since the tool was deployed, judges can stay on track in regard to their hearings and litigants, and it's a rarity if a hearing is delayed due to a party wandering the building.
 
Warren says they are also using Infax’s public notice system, CourtBoard, with good success in the commissioner’s court building, and after a move later this year they have plans to roll out a check-in kiosk in the Truancy Court for use by all involved in each case. Then the judge will know in real-time when parties are present in the building.
 
Chaos to Competence
Overall, Warren is pleased with the results garnered. Each of the courts in Dallas County holds a daily docket with an average of 30 cases, and each year more than 100,000 cases are filed throughout the county. With a case load that keeps visitors bustling throughout the courthouse, employing digital signage has helped the Dallas Court change organized chaos into just plain competence. CTWith more than 45 courtrooms spread out over nine floors, including 15 civil district, five county civil, 11 family and three probate courts, the Dallas County Court was a self-proclaimed “organized chaos.” It's a familiar story: Litigants coming to the facility were unfamiliar with the flow, and even if they got directions they often didn’t understand them, security queues filled the lobby, and throngs of people milled about and stalled in front of the elevators confused about where to go. 
 
With so many people moving in so many different directions—from litigants to large jury pools on certain days, and others—“it got pretty chaotic,” acknowledges John F. Warren, the Dallas County clerk. Of course, he furthers, visitors would prefer to focus on the reason they came to court, not where they were going. But the reality was they had to “scramble around to find their courtroom, and the result was they were often late to their hearing.”
It seems that litigants actually had been arriving to the courthouse on time, he notes, only to be delayed by wandering lost through the facility, and arriving at the courtroom after the judge had called the case. The judge would award the party present whatever remedy they were seeking, only to find the other party had been on premise. At that point, the judge would attempt to restart the hearing, sometimes only to find out the original party who had been present had left. Therefore, everyone would need to remain until all the parties were reassembled. “We were basically duplicating the entire process and wasting a lot of time,” he explains.
 
Re-holding the hearings was not infrequent. “It was a regular occurrence that was happening four or five times a week,” explains Warren. To address the issue, choosing digital docket displays was “intuitive,” he says, an obvious solution to streamline the process and provide much needed efficiency. In 2014, with plenty of support from the county, commissioners and judges, Dallas County Courts went live with DocketCall displays from Infax.