The events of 9/11 and the federal focus on Homeland Security have brought to the forefront the importance of Court Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP). In the event of a federal emergency or any unforeseen court closure due to weather, natural disaster, or threat, it is important to communicate with your employees quickly and effectively with precise information. The AJIS Jury System offers tremendous flexibility for sending outbound phone calls to jurors, and with no system changes your court can readily use AJIS to send emergency notifications to employees as well.

From time-to-time you may have cases that you anticipate could settle over the weekend. Before leaving on Friday you assign a pre-recorded 'Scheduled-to-Appear' message, but if the case does settle, you must return to the courthouse to change the message before Sunday evening. To avoid returning to work to change the message, use an Ad hoc message on Friday to assign a tentative 'Scheduled-to-Appear' message then call the AJIS Remote Administration facility from home to re-record new instructions later in the weekend if necessary.

With the ability for jurors to check the status of their requests 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by calling AJIS, several of our customers have entirely eliminated mailings of deferral and excused approval letters. The elimination of these mailings saves the court a considerable amount of money in postage, supplies and labor, not to mention time that could be spent on other jury administration tasks.

Just as AJIS automatically imports scheduled appearance dates from your host jury system, it can also import deferral dates and include them in your deferral messages. If desired, VoiceMetrix can add similar deferral and excused messages as Outbound Reminder Calls to proactively notify jurors as well. If you would like to include a deferral date in your deferred message or add similar Outbound Reminder Calls to your Call Flow, please contact us...

It never fails! You have instructed jurors to call in after 5:00 p.m. on Friday evening, but at 2:00 p.m., while you are still updating their instructions, AJIS is receiving calls from them. They are calling too early and hearing old, incorrect instructions! To avoid this you can...

One of the most important responsibilities of jury office is scheduling just the right number of jurors to appear for jury duty. You have told us how much AJIS has helped you run your busy jury office, but mistakes can still be made. Double-checking message assignments is one way of catching these mistakes and the Message Filter can help you do this.

How often can you accurately predict the number of jurors who will report when scheduled? How often do you have too many jurors? Or too few jurors? How many extra jurors do you schedule (and pay) just to be sure you will have enough on a specific day? You can schedule jurors more efficiently by using an Outbound Reminder Call, Inbound Reporting Instruction and an AJIS report to predict the number of jurors who will actually report as instructed.

When you work with large jury pools you can save time by using your JMS barcode scanner to locate jurors in AJIS. Several courts use JMS barcode labels on their jury summons questionnaires and other documents. This barcode identifies and locates the juror in JMS and can do the same thing in AJIS.