Page 23 - Pierce County Lawyer - January February 2024

Naughty or ? By Jessica Campbell
began using NICE in early 2023 for District and Superior C ourt criminal cases. The system has not been without its hang-ups and
This means litigants will provide their exhibits in digital format to the court ahead of time and those exhibits (photos, reports, statements, etc) will be displayed to witnesses, jurors, and other parties
on laptops and screens instead of on paper. The transition will start in one
test courtroom with small, likely civil
or Family Law trials with attorneys, and expand from there. Rest assured, training will be provided to attorneys, judges, staff, and pro se litigants alike.
While the court system in general has been slow and somewhat reluctant
to embrace the advancements of technology, Pierce County is going to take a giant leap forward and, by this time next year, trials will look much different. The days of hauling boxes and binders filled with documents copied in triplicate into the courtroom will soon be a thing of the past.
Jessica Campbell has been a criminal defense attorney with the Dept. of Assigned Counsel for 11 years and represents the criminal bar as the TPCBA Criminal Law Section Chair.
Over the past year, the Pierce County court system and local law enforcement agencies have
begun the process of converting to a new system of digital evidence management to address the increasing amount of digital evidence in cases brought to court.
NICE, the company contracted
to provide the new evidence system, provides a cloud-based system where law enforcement officers directly upload evidence to the platform that can later be downloaded by both prosecuting and defense attorney offices.
The system does away with the need
for the prosecutors to provide paper discovery and CDs to defense attorneys.
The Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office
frustrations, however. It still takes weeks to receive the discovery, there is a short window of time to download it, it’s often voluminous and unorganized, and there is no longer a record kept of when the State made the evidence available
to defense counsel. It’s also subject to human error, such as law enforcement officers uploading evidence to the wrong case. Members of the private Criminal Defense Bar and Dept. of Assigned Counsel have been meeting with NICE representatives to try to address these issues, but most likely we’ll be dealing with them long-term.
Even though NICE only impacts criminal practitioners right now, it’s soon going to impact civil and Family Law cases. Starting in mid-late 2024, Pierce County Superior Court will start transitioning to the use of digital exhibits in trial (physical evidence excluded).
Fraser Robinson Speir Attorney Outsource
www.frslegal.com bonnie@frslegal.com l 253.564.3669
z
Providing legal research and briefing support at all administrative and judicial levels to the Pierce County Bar for over 25 years
January/February 2024 | PIERCE COUNTY LAWYER 23