Deborah Seyller, clerk of the local Circuit Court, does not have any statistics to back up that assertion. Nevertheless, she is confident that since the introduction of Adobe's LiveCycle in 2006 for such legal cases in the county's court system the ability of the local sheriff to arrest a perpetrator of domestic violence before the victim arrives home after instigating her legal action has increased enormously.
That is because the time lapse between the judge issuing the restraining order and the receiving of the necessary documentation by the sheriff miles away to carry it out has been reduced considerably.
"It used to take four to six hours to deliver a hard copy paper to the sheriff's office," Seyller stated. "Now, the sheriff gets it in six seconds. The judge signs the order and it is immediately emailed.
If you think of the victim returning back to the house there was more opportunity [in the pre-Adobe LiveCycle period] for the abuser to suspect that there was something going on in the home and for another confrontation, more abuse to happen. So, the possibility exists that [the solution] has saved some lives."
Under the previous hard copy paperwork regime, a woman seeking a restraining order against her partner might spend close to 90 minutes at the Kane County Circuit Court building writing out by hand her request which would be entered into the office computer system by a court employee.
"If you were in the abused persons' position, it could be very stressful. You know for them to actually seek help is a big help. We have seen people in tears and so now you are faced with 17 pages of forms to fill out. It had a lot of repeat information on it. Your name was repeated. It was such an overwhelming process, to come into the courthouse to start this."
LiveCycle reduces the time for filling out of legal petitioning forms by half and eliminates potential errors that had existed in the previous data entry of the victim's personal information into the office computer system, added Seyller.
Under the new data collection and workflow solution the request for an order of protection in a domestic case in Kane County can be started on the Internet from a home computer where the person is guided by a serious of questions and given a receipt number. This is followed by an obligatory trip to the county court house to complete the legal action process with a digital signature.
However, if the Internet is not a practical option within a toxic home environment or the woman is uncomfortable with computers, the petition for a restraining order can be started at the court house on a tablet connected to the LiveCycle system with the assistance of law clerks or a local free nonprofit clinic, Prairie State Legal Services -- the latter is targeted at low income people and those over 60 years of age.
Also, LiveCycle facilitates an internal electronic queuing process where the various petitions for retraining orders against partners are individually presented to the first available judge in Kane County, each of whom has a personal computer linked to the system.
Seyller recalled how some of the judges were initially uncomfortable with the new technology. "You know a lot of [the judges] were not even using email. So, I did find that age was not a factor. I had a 75 year old who said, 'show me how to do,' and another judge who was in his 50s that ran every time he saw me in the hallway."
Costing less than a quarter of a million dollars LiveCycle took one year to implement, she told Digital Communities.
Currently, Seyller has her sights on including all of the criminal warrants of arrest in an expanded application of LiveCycle at Kane County where circuit court staff manage 150,000 cases from simple traffic violations to serious felonies.
What made the initial implementation of LiveCycle exciting, she recalled, is the involvement of all the possible parties in the effort to seek a restraining order for the victim.
"The Prairie State Legal Services, the state attorney staff and the community shelters were coming in and were very eager to do this and more than willing to sit down and see how to fill out the forms electronically."
