For most of the history of courts, contesting a traffic ticket meant taking a day off work, driving to the courthouse, and waiting for a docket that might be scheduled once a month. Over the past decade that has been changing, and Michigan’s district courts have been among the earliest in the country to move routine matters online.

The pandemic turned that from a forward-looking experiment into a necessity. Courts that had never offered an online option built one in a hurry. Courts that already had one simply kept working. In the conversations I have with court administrators, that history now shows up as two very different questions. The first wave asked: can we do this at all? The second wave, which is where many courts find themselves today, asks something harder: is the platform we have still the right one for how we work? It is a question we hear every week on the Court ODR Podcast.

That second question is why I wanted to talk with Lisa Fusik, Court Administrator at 14A District Court in Michigan. 14A does not have a first-wave story. It has been resolving traffic tickets online since 2014, twelve years of daily use that began long before most courts had considered it. Few courts anywhere have more experience with what works online and what doesn’t. And recently, 14A changed platforms.

Lisa was direct about why:

“We had been using a product since 2014 that had morphed into something that wasn’t working as well for us as it initially did. The ODR.com resolution platform definitely filled a void for us.”
Lisa Fusik, Court Administrator, 14A District Court

What interested me most was not the switch itself. It was what a court with that much experience asked for. It was not more features, and it was not more options. After twelve years, 14A had a short list of non-negotiables, and the one at the top is something anyone building software for courts should hear. I will let Lisa explain it in her own words in the case study.

Then there are the results. The number itself belongs in the case study, where Lisa gives it context. What I can say here is that it is a default rate on cases resolved through the platform, and that what produced it comes down to one change in the way payment terms are set, and to what happened to the repeat notices and the chasing that used to follow a ticket. The case study also covers the rollout, which is the part every court administrator asks me about first.

And there is a moment in the conversation, involving a couch, a show, and a traffic ticket at midnight, that says more about where courts are headed than any statistic. That one I am leaving for Lisa to deliver.

What 14A asked for, and what it got

The full case study covers the switch, the rollout, and the results, in Lisa Fusik’s own words.