By Jim Little
Precise Digital’s focus is providing simple recording solutions for police interview rooms, Child Advocacy Centers, Courts, and Administrative Hearings.
But that’s not all. We are also a provider of Courtcall’s Remote Appearance platform.
What’s a remote appearance? It’s the ability for courts to increase access to justice by providing a video and telephone method for the public to attend court arraignments and hearings via the internet without having to appear in person. It’s also known as Online Dispute Resolution (ODR).
Let’s Face It, This Process Sucks
So, Wednesday is going to be a day for arraignments? Think of all the steps that have to occur to make this happen:
- Notify all the participants via email and/or phone call of their appearance date.
- Notify them AGAIN the day before.
- On the day of their online appearance, contact them, yet again, and queue them up to get them ready to go in an orderly fashion.
- Some participants are having troubles connecting? You’ll have to handle that too.
- Start your Remote Appearance session and make sure your audio and video is working.
- Select each User and bring them online for their appearance.
- Wait, some people dropped off by accident? Reach out to get them back online.
- Go through your list of participants, on-by-one, until there aren’t anymore.
Sounds like a lot for you and for your staff to do, right? If you think about it, there are at least three people that need to be available during this whole process from start to finish.
- Judge
- Court Clerk – to manage the participants
- IT Staff – when something goes wrong
What If You Didn’t Have To Do All That?
You’ll never walk through this alone with Courtcall Remote Appearance. Look at steps 1-8 again. Let’s see how this changes on the Courtcall platform.
<b><i>5. Start your Remote Appearance session and make sure your audio and video is working.</b></i>
That’s it. Steps 1-4 and 6-8 are all handled by Courtcall. And, it’s the annoying, mundane (but important) stuff anyway.
Courtcall handles everything else for you.
Once you sign up for the Courtcall service, you get a dedicated service rep whose responsibility is to relieve you and your staff of the technical and administrative hassle. Scheduling, contacting participants, getting them online (via phone or video), technical difficulties, bringing them into the appearance, getting them back online if they drop off, etc is all part of what your dedicated service rep does as part of the Remote Appearance service. Your Courtcall Rep is always on the call monitoring the activity and is able to make any changes for you on the fly during your session – so you don’t have to.
Not a Replacement
Your Courtcall Rep is not a replacement for your court clerk or your IT staff.
Can’t be.
IT and clerks are busy enough. Your Courtcall Rep solely focuses on one small process only.
How Much Does It Cost To Use Courtcall?
These days it should come to no surprise that it costs nothing to the courts. All equipment is provided. Billing is paid for by the participants in the form of a remote appearance fee. This fee covers the technology, the use of the Courtcall platform, the scheduling by your Courtcall Rep, and the coordination during your remote appearance day.
At Precise Digital, we do live web demos of the Courtcall solution all over the country. To see a live demo just email us or call 866-282-5878 and we can show you how to use Courtcall’s access to justice solution.
