Public Defender’s Office Reduces Manual Data Entry with Secure File Transfer Software

Every organization has legacy processes. Manual data entry, file cabinets full of paper records, sensitive documents sent across the organization by email, or even file transfers sent via homegrown scripts or FTP—all these processes can cause more headaches than their worth.

Unfortunately, implementing a new strategy to replace a legacy one isn’t always as easy as saying “let’s do it!” Sometimes budget gets in the way. Sometimes, too many things are dependent on that key process, and changing it out would take too long or interrupt sales. In these cases, IT teams must wait for the right moment to strike.

For the Public Defender’s Office 4th Circuit in Jacksonville, Florida, their legacy process was especially long and frustrating. Receiving, handling, and entering court details into their database relied on the sensitive paper documents that were delivered from the county clerk’s office to the defender’s office by hand and entered manually into their database by full-time employees.

With thousands of papers to process each week, this manual process impeded their team of attorneys and consultants, who needed the information readily available for their cases. Furthermore, it wasn’t secure: documents and video evidence could easily be misplaced, damaged, or viewed by the wrong people between the time it was signed by an attourney and the time it entered a database.

This process continued for years, until the right moment came: the county clerk’s office stopped accepting paper documents. The IT team at the Public Defender’s Office jumped on the chance to streamline several of their manual data entry and file transfer processes. With a list of requirements in mind, they searched for a solution that would reduce employee workloads, improve internal collaboration projects, and satisfy their compliance requirements for web service connections and e-filing.

In the end, out of all products evaluated, they chose GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer.

With GoAnywhere MFT implemented to replace their legacy file transfer and data entry processes, the Public Defender’s Office has been able to solve many roadblocks with GoAnywhere’s robust features.

To date, they’ve been able to:

Streamline over 1,000 file transfers a week
Meet requirements for a secure connection with the state e-filing HTTPS portal
Encode every document with Base64
Achieve secure, affordable collaboration with internal users and outside vendors
Share video evidence through secure folders, which eliminates the need for physical disks