DigitalBridge’s Digital Warrants™ Program Meets Tremendous Success in Cook County Illinois Circuit Court; Slashes Warrant Processing Expenditures by up to 90 Percent

New electronic warrant process dramatically reduces time and costs in the world’s second largest unified court system

Case study assesses effectiveness of Digital Warrants in
Cook County Circuit Court pilot program

OREM, Utah - December 4, 2008

DigitalBridge℠, the leader in protected information sharing technologies and solutions for digital ecosystems, today announced that it is deploying its Digital Warrants™ solution in two additional Cook County, Illinois, suburban court districts, following the tremendous success in Cook County Circuit Court District One, Branch Court 29, serving Chicago, and Districts Five and Six. The technology solution promises to transform the judicial process, by allowing critical information to be shared between stakeholders, so justice is dispensed more rapidly, accurately, securely and at dramatically lower taxpayer expense.

Digital Warrants is a solution which makes the manual warrant process electronic. The process, which has typically taken several days and cost over $260 per warrant in Cook County, now takes less than 20 minutes and costs the court only $25 per warrant. In 2005, Cook County Circuit Court reportedly processed approximately 49,000 warrants, costing over $13 million. Through Digital Warrants, expenditures for processing those warrants would have cost merely $1.3 million, a 90 percent reduction in cost to taxpayers.

"We are exceedingly proud of the success of Digital Warrants in Cook County,” said Terry Pitts, President and CEO of DigitalBridge. Mr. Pitts added, “The Cook County Circuit Court system is a tremendously busy one and we have been able to help Cook reach a new level of technological innovation through Digital Warrants. We are thrilled to work with the Honorable Clerk Brown and her team to extend this solution throughout their system, helping Cook County Circuit Court meet its citizens’ rights to due process and public safety."

"With more than two million court cases handled each year by the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, it is imperative that we continually seek, find and implement innovative ways to more efficiently and effectively serve the citizens of Cook County," said Honorable Dorothy Brown, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County.

"DigitalBridge, and its Digital Warrants solution, has provided another opportunity for us to upgrade and enhance our services. This automation allows our office to further streamline processes and greatly reduce costs. The benefits of this latest innovation to the Clerk's Office, our affiliate law enforcement and justice agencies, and Cook County citizens are tremendous."

The roll-out of the Digital Warrants pilot program was funded with a grant from the National Criminal History Improvement Project (NCHIP), through the United States Department of Justice. The project has integrated the processing of orders of protection, warrants, and wiretap orders in Cook County. The funding has allowed the Clerk of the Court’s office to create a Web-based system between its criminal case management system (KRIM) and the information systems of the Chicago Police Department, the Offices of the Cook County State’s Attorney, Public Defender, Chief Judge, Sheriff, and Illinois State Police. The automated process ensures the complete, accurate, timely, and secure transfer of information, as well as the ability to exchange documents between agencies, the security of digital signatures on all documents, an electronic audit log to track changes in the status of information, and the ability for authorized users in every agency to access current information about each case.

Perhaps most important, the Digital Warrants solution allows Cook County law enforcement officials to return to fighting crime, rather than spend time and resources carrying warrants to various agency officials for their signatures, expediting the warrant process and saving lives.

To read the complete case study, please visit: http://www.digitalbridge.com/en/us/downloads/dbjust-cs-20081204-01.pdf

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DigitalBridge was founded in 2004, in Orem, Utah, by industry-leading executives from the technology, education, healthcare, justice and legal industries. The company’s mission is to build solutions that bridge the information gap that exists between organizations involved in complex ecosystems. DigitalBridge’s revolutionary, patent-pending DigitalFusion Platform™ is a completely new architecture for managing information in motion. Our solutions provide protected information sharing to the education, justice, and healthcare markets by leveraging existing technology investments and eliminating barriers to critical information sharing and management while protecting the security, privacy and integrity of the information. Our unique solutions reside on top of existing legacy systems without requiring rip and replace, allowing authorized users to access the right information, at the right time, in the right context, in a secure and timely manner, 24/7/365, from any Web-enabled device.

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