If you followed last month’s update, you already know that the TechShare.Indigent Defense project is 100% grant-funded by the Texas Indigent Defense Commission. The grant covers implementation, support, and technical migration of the current system for each of the nine participating counties over a 3-year timespan.
Since then, we’ve welcomed two more counties—Montgomery and Anderson—totaling 11 participants currently on the TechShare.Indigent Defense project. The two counties were recently approved to join the program following their application for the grant.
The story doesn’t end there. Bell County was recently awarded additional grant funding for enhancements to the system on behalf of the participating counties. As the counties continue onboarding more users, they’ve identified areas where enhancements under the grant will improve overall accountability, transparency, and flexibility in the system.
The grant funding allows the TechShare.Indigent Defense team to add more robust functionality in the following areas.
- Juvenile appointments and vouchers: create the ability to schedule appointments, submit vouchers, and report timely appointments
- Enhanced attorney portal: make more options available to attorneys for continuing legal education (CLE) reporting
- Magistration portal: create the ability for counties to have access to magistration documentation from a central location as opposed to email, fax, or hand delivery
- Enhancements to the core system: incorporate additional flexibility for counties to meet statute and local indigent defense plans, including a dashboard view of statutory and planned items
- Additional points of integration: create integration points to county data systems (such as jails and courts) to increase visibility and reduce duplicating data in separate systems
Because the enhancements are still being analyzed and prioritized by the technical team, an implementation plan has not yet been published. The team intends to schedule a workshop with participating counties to gather more input to establish priorities.
We’ll be providing more updates on the project in the coming months.