(CN) - Rising out of the ashes of a failed IT system for California's trial courts, three private companies have been chosen as premier providers in the lucrative business of selling software to the far-flung courts of the biggest state in the nation.
The move to private vendors comes in the aftermath of the crash-and-burn of a half-billion-dollar, publically funded software project driven by the Administrative Office of the Courts, the central bureaucracy that sits above the trial courts.
Called the Court Case Management System, the software was abandoned last year after a host of courts rejected it as cumbersome, labor intensive and crash-prone. In addition, state legislators were highly critical of the project's daily drain of hundreds of thousands of dollars from public coffers.
Sacramento Superior Court -- one of the few courts that installed CCMS only to became a leading critic of the software -- announced last week that three private companies have qualified to sell what is likely to be many millions of dollars-worth of case management programming to California's 58 trial courts.
Sacramento and Santa Clara Superior Court have taken the lead within a group of IT workers from 13 trial courts called the California Information Technology Managers Forum. The forum also includes tech staff from courts in Orange, Humboldt, Alameda, Mariposa, Riverside, Fresno, Kings, Kern, Merced, San Diego and San Mateo counties, according to a list provided by the administrative office.
They vetted and OK'd Texas-based Tyler Technologies, New Mexico-based Justice Systems Inc. and Thomson Reuters' LT Court Tech.
As an example of the sums involved, San Luis Obispo Superior Court, a relatively small court in California, recently agreed to pay Tyler $3.1 million to buy the Odyssey case management system that allows for electronic filing. Tyler was chosen despite pricing its software substantially higher than the competing bidders, based on the company's willingness to sell rights to the system outright rather than licensing them on a yearly basis.
Tyler has been winning a big number of contracts in the last couple years with courts in Texas, Indiana, Nevada and now California.
Robert Oyung, the Chief Information Officer for Santa Clara, said the vetting of the software vendors was a collaborative effort by the technology forum members. He said all courts were invited to review the top six proposers, but eight courts were responsible for rating, or scoring, the applicants.
Sacramento Judge Trena Burger-Plavan noted that staff from the Administrative Office of the Courts also jumped into the scoring.
"In terms of the scoring," said the judge, "I know that the AOC participated and all courts were able to provide feedback on the vendor proposals and demonstrations that were presented."
She said the forum's evaluators were anonymous. "Each submitted votes after receiving input from participants throughout all the courts and the AOC."
Judge James Herman of Santa Barbara, the former chair of the CCMS internal committee on the governing Judicial Council and a consistent promoter of CCMS, is now the chair of the Judicial Council's technology committee and also chair of the committee's technology task force.
He said in an interview that the individual trial courts don't have to go with any of the three chosen ones. The trial courts can also use a model "request for proposal," jargon for an invitation to bid on a project.
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