Technology funding hopes to advance solicitor’s office case management

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - Solicitors’ offices around the state are looking to take the load off with an upgrade to their technology.

State lawmakers are giving every solicitor’s office $600,000 to upgrade case management technology systems.

Scarlett Wilson, the 9th circuit solicitor, hopes to increase their cloud storage, invest in AI software to transcribe long interviews and create a portal to track plea offers and deals.

In Charleston and Berkeley counties, they already have a case management system, so this money would go toward improving the current system.

Wilson says the upgrades will help the system move quickly.

“A defendant and a defense attorney can’t make a decision on the case that they don’t have the information, the quicker we can get them that information, the better,” Wilson says.

The ever-changing technology needs to be used as an asset within the department, Wilson hopes.

“It just makes the transfer of information now instead of police officers bringing us DVDs, it used to be VHS, but bringing us DVDs or then thumb drives,” Wilson explains. “Now they can upload these things to the cloud and then we can download it and get the information that way. And it really happens so much quicker than it did in the past.”

Wilson says tracking things like pleas will help create transparency reports too.

“Being able to have that information will help us show that we are being fair and treating people the same throughout the life of a case or if we’re not, correcting that,” she says.

She says it is important that her office also provides the gathered data gathered to the public.

“Why are we dismissing cases? Why are we making plea offers things like that and we’ve started tracking those things,” she explains. “And we’re able to issue reports, we’re able to have that information on our website so that if you’re interested in a case and you want to know what happened and why you can do that research on your own.”

You can search previous cases and their entire history on the solicitor’s office website:

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