Court Leader’s Advantage Podcast Episode: September 20, 2022
Brought to You in Cooperation with NACM
Obtaining customer feedback, obtaining usable feedback, obtaining enough of it to be able to rationally modify court programs, all of these are major hurdles. And yet getting good customer feedback is so important. It is important to complete the loop: to plan, to act, to check results, and then to refine. And this effort has been made even more complicated by COVID.
LaGratta Consulting, with the backing of the State Justice Institute, has developed the Court Voices Project piloting 12 courts from around the country. These courts are collecting real-time, feedback from staff and court users about their pandemic experiences and their ideas. Some of the questions the Court Voices Project is trying to answer include, what percentage of court users prefer virtual hearings and why; have court users found new communication channels like phone banks and online chat features to be more convenient and more accessible; and what ideas do line-staff have for improving court practices?
This month we’re looking at court customers and how we collect feedback from them. Some topics we will explore include:
- How do we obtain more and better customer feedback?
- Why should court leaders focus on better ways to obtain feedback?
- What have courts been able to do with more enhanced feedback? and
- What advice do these panelists have for the rest of us?
Listen to the September 20, 2022, CLAPodcast Episode on your way to or from work. 36 Minutes 41 Seconds
Watch the September 20, 2022, CLAPodcast Episode 37 minutes 37 seconds
Become part of the conversation! Email us at CLAPodcasts@nacmnet.org
Today’s Panel
The Honorable Clemens Landau is a Judge with the Justice Court in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the Education Committee Co-Chair for the Utah Center for Legal Inclusion. Judge Landau was appointed to the Salt Lake City Justice Court in 2017 by Mayor Jackie Biskupski. Judge Landau received a law degree from the University of Utah in 2008. He worked as a civil litigator at Parr, Brown, Gee & Loveless before moving to the appellate firm of Zimmerman Jones Booher.
Before becoming an attorney, Judge Landau worked as a paramedic in Boston and then managed a woodworking and music instrument-making company in Germany before going to law school. Judge Landau currently serves as the presiding judge of the Salt Lake City Justice court, and as a member of Utah’s Access to Justice Commission and the AOC’s Standing Committee on Technology. He also serves on the Executive Board of the Salt Lake County Bar Association, as a board member of the Utah Center for Legal Inclusion (a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the goals of equity and inclusion in Utah’s legal profession), and as a board member of the Utah Bar’s Leadership Academy. In addition, he teaches a Law and Literature class at the Utah State Prison that is part of the University of Utah’s Prison Education Project (UPEP). He is passionate about creating programs to help students of color succeed in pre-law programs and law school.
TIMOTHY C. KUHLMAN was born and raised in Arlington, Ohio. He graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan in 1988 and graduated from the University of Toledo Law School and joined the Ohio Bar in 1991.
During Law School he was a member of the Law Review and was a Prosecutor Intern in the Toledo Municipal Court. After graduation he became an associate at Eastman & Smith, Ltd., where he practiced for 14 years, trying more than 20 jury trials and handling more than 20 appeals.
James Cho was named Municipal Court Administrator in June 2015 and has served as the Deputy Court Administrator since 2006. He first joined the City of Boulder in 1995 as a Records and Information Specialist for the Boulder Police Department, where he eventually held the position of Records Supervisor and Systems Administrator. He has also served as a Records Management Assistant in the Central Records division of the City Manager’s Office.
As Director of Municipal Court operations, Cho oversees a $2 million annual budget and 17 employees. He directs the courts’ processing of traffic, general, animal, parking, photo radar and photo red light violations and the collection of approximately $5.5 million in annual revenue. A key responsibility is the development of technology applications to improve operations.
Cho has served as a co-chair of the city’s Inclusion and Diversity Team from 2010 to 2012. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Public Management from Colorado State University. He and his wife have called Boulder home for over 20 years.
De’Von Kissick-Kelly is the Deputy Court Administrator for the Boulder Municipal Court. Ms. Kissick-Kelly has devoted her career to empowering women through activism, advocacy and education. De’Von began her career with The Julian Center, a nationally recognized Family Justice Center. While there she helped to develop the Family Violence Outreach Advocate Program in cooperation with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD). She has presented at local, state, national, and international conferences on the issues of domestic violence, interagency collaboration, and transformative education.
De’Von has served as a Training and Technical Assistance Consultant for the Office of Victims of Crime, Ivy Tech Community College, and the Domestic Violence Network of Central Indiana. In 2012 she received an award from Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard for her work on the Baker One Project, a proactive policing initiative that brought local non-profit, governmental, and social service agencies together for the shared goal of holistically addressing the issue of domestic violence. Ms. Kissick-Kelly’s work with IMPD was featured on the WTHR Channel 13’s domestic violence awareness campaign, Shattering the Silence.
De’Von holds a B.S in Criminal Justice and Criminology and a M.A. in Adult and Community Education from Ball State University. My paper, A Case Study of Radical Adult Education and Transformative Learning through a Diverse Adult Learning Workshop, was published in The Journal of Transformative Education.
Emily LaGratta, J.D., is a national subject matter expert on the topics of procedural justice and user voice. In leading LaGratta Consulting, she works with local and national organizations to design and implement innovative programming, engage end-users and utilize their feedback, and develop practitioner resources and training tools that help enhance public trust and confidence in legal institutions. Recently, this has included the Court Voices Project, a 12-court pilot collecting real-time feedback from staff and court users about pandemic response practices. Emily has authored many relevant tools, including We Want to Hear From You!: A Toolkit and Measuring Perceptions of Fairness. She started LaGratta Consulting in 2019 after nearly ten years at the Center for Court Innovation.
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Court Voices Project User Feedback
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