Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office Enters Growing Number of DAs Transforming Digital Evidence Management with NICE Evidencentral

NICE  today announced that the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) will be deploying NICE Justice, one of the solutions in NICE’s Evidencentral platform, to transform how it manages digital evidence and help Lancaster’s ADAs (Assistant District Attorneys) find the truth in digital evidence faster. Lancaster County is turning to NICE Justice to eliminate cumbersome processes for managing digital evidence intake and discovery so attorneys can focus attention on prosecuting cases and getting timely results for victims.

Part of the Evidencentral cloud-based platform, NICE Justice digitally transforms how district attorneys, paralegals and office staff receive, interact with, manage and share digital evidence, from beginning to end. It streamlines and simplifies the entire case management process, from evidence intake and investigation to discovery and trial preparation.

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Heather L. Adams, District Attorney, Lancaster County, said, “Victims and community safety are at the forefront of our efforts. We team with many law-enforcement departments throughout the county to successfully investigate and prosecute cases, and digital evidence is a key element in our process. The breadth and scope of digital evidence has grown tremendously over the past few years, but our ability to process it has not increased proportionately. We quickly recognized a need for more efficient, user-friendly, uniform processes that would be available to us through digital transformation, and NICE Justice is going to provide us that relief.”

Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President, NICE, said, “Our Evidencentral platform is helping all types of public safety and criminal justice agencies transform digital evidence management, from collection and preparation to disclosure and presentation. For district attorneys’ offices in particular, digital evidence is at the center of the work ADAs do every day. NICE Justice transforms every aspect of how digital evidence is collected, analyzed and shared, so ADAs can manage the volumes of evidence more efficiently, arrive at the truth faster, and get back to the important work of seeking justice.”

The Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office routinely receives digital evidence from the Pennsylvania State Police and 26 municipal police departments. Today, the daily deluge of digital evidence arrives in a variety of ways, including email, or on discs and thumb drives which are either picked up or hand delivered. NICE Justice standardizes and streamlines how this evidence is received and shared. Departments upload digital evidence to the cloud through a single, secure online portal. It is then automatically deposited into digital case folders and made immediately accessible to ADAs to accelerate the case building process.

Currently, ADAs spend up to thirty percent of their time each week tracking down evidence that may be stored in different places or never received. With NICE Justice, all digital evidence is stored in one place and uploaded video evidence is automatically transcoded to a playable format. Additionally, ADAs have access to time-saving tools to jumpstart the trial prep process all in one place, including tools for transcription, video clip and timeline creation, and redaction. Today, ADAs spend hundreds of hours per week copying, preparing and sending discovery. Using NICE Justice, ADAs can share evidence with defense attorneys through a fully digital, trackable process.

“The Lancaster County Office of the District Attorney is dedicated to achieving timely justice and ensuring community safety,” added District Attorney Adams.“We zealously work to deliver justice and preserve the rights of crime victims. By using NICE Justice to eliminate cumbersome digital evidence management processes, our ADAs can get back to the work they’re intended to do and focus their attention on prosecuting cases and getting timely results for victims.”