Case Study: Maricopa County Attorney's Office

Leveraging Ricoh's eDiscovery Managed Services and OpenAxes amid surging public records requests.

About the Maricopa County Attorney's Office

The MCAO in Phoenix, Arizona serves one of the largest populations in any U.S. county with nearly four million residents. They prosecute more than 35,000 felony criminal cases a year — along with a robust civil roster — while simultaneously participating in community events, providing crime prevention resources and strengthening the community at large.

"The other provider's solution was powerful and capable, but I'd equate it to bringing an elephant gun to a squirrel hunt. Plus, it was cost prohibitive to implement countywide."
Gary Peet
Director of Information Technology
Maricopa County Attorney's Office, Phoenix, Arizona

Challenge

Located in Arizona, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office (MCAO) was increasingly taking on cases that attracted widespread media attention. As their profile grew, so did the number of public records requests (PRRs). They jumped from processing approximately 30 PRRs per year to more than a thousand per year.

Unconsolidated data to fulfill PRR requests — and legal hold requests — resided in hard copies, emails and unstructured files — forcing employees to hunt through disparate data silos. MCAO issued an RFP to find a partner to provide the right guidance and technology solution. But the winning provider's solution was excessive — and costly.

Solution

MCAO needed a robust yet reasonably priced solution to automate their data and streamline their process and workflow. The timing couldn't have been better. Ricoh's eDiscovery had recently added the powerful and affordable new solution, OpenAxes, to its technology profile.

OpenAxes, as a Ricoh eDiscovery Managed Services solution, changed how MCAO looked at the way they were doing business and helped them gain a new perspective on things they could improve upon — for PRRs and beyond. OpenAxes is a subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that resides behind MCAO's firewall for on-premise identification, collection, smart culling and data management.

With OpenAxes, there's no need for a costly, up-front capital investment.
Ricoh handles everything from installation, configuration and ongoing software updates.
MCAO's users are provided login access to view their data at a monthly fixed cost.
One-on-one training sessions are available so users understand the functionality and can use the solution immediately.

Result

MCAO now has a powerful technology tool in OpenAxes and a collaborative partnership with Ricoh's eDiscovery that has transformed their PRR and legal hold workflow processes. With OpenAxes, they can:

Identify, collect, process and search for information quickly.
Conduct searches thoroughly and efficiently to meet the growing demand for information.
Cull down the same amount of data that previously took them 6 weeks, in just 3.5 hours.

Next, MCAO is looking to expand the solution to other government agencies in the county and build on the capabilities of OpenAxes to help streamline more of their legal processes. In the end, they found exactly what they were looking for — at a cost they could afford."Now, we can get into more source information to do our searches and we have a greater scope of folders that can be searched," said Gary Peet, Director of Information Technology at MCAO.

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