Questions courts ask before they change jury systems.

How long does it take to implement a jury management system?

Implementation time depends far more on data than on software. For a county moving from an existing system, the work is converting the master wheel and juror history, configuring statutes and local rules, loading summons templates, and training staff. A court with clean source data and a decided set of rules moves quickly; a court that needs to settle policy questions first takes longer, and that time is spent on decisions rather than on us. We would rather give you an honest schedule after seeing your data than quote a number that sounds impressive in a proposal. The first thing we ask for is a copy of your current data, so the estimate is based on what you actually have.

Can juror data stay on our own servers instead of the cloud?

Yes. EmpanelJMS runs either as a cloud-hosted service or installed on hardware your county owns and controls, inside your own network. Most jury software today is sold cloud-only, so a county whose IT policy or state statute requires county-controlled data is often shut out of modern software entirely. That is not the case here. The on-premises deployment is the same platform with the same features, supported by the same people. Your IT department provides the server and keeps its existing backup and security posture. Courts that start on-premises can move to the cloud later, and courts in the cloud can bring the system in-house, without changing platforms or losing history.

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What is a jury administration system?

A jury administration system is the software a court uses to run jury service end to end: building and maintaining the master jury wheel from source lists, generating and mailing summonses, processing qualification responses, drawing panels, checking jurors in, tracking attendance across the term, and calculating and disbursing juror pay. The terms jury management system and jury administration system are used interchangeably. What distinguishes a purpose-built one from a jury module inside a case management system is whether the selection process is reproducible and auditable, and whether court staff can configure their own statutes and local rules without a change order.

What is a master jury wheel?

The master jury wheel is the pool of names a court draws from when it summons jurors. It is built by combining source lists supplied by the state or county — typically registered voters, licensed drivers, and identification card holders — then removing duplicates, deceased individuals, people outside the jurisdiction, and anyone disqualified or excused under the court's rules. The wheel is refreshed on a schedule set by statute or local rule. Its quality determines whether a court can summon a fair cross-section of the community, which is why deduplication, address hygiene, and an auditable record of how the wheel was assembled matter as much as the drawing itself.

How EmpanelJMS builds and maintains the master wheel →

Can a jury panel draw be reproduced if it is challenged?

It can, provided the system was built for it. EmpanelJMS captures a snapshot of the eligible pool at the moment a panel is generated and uses fully deterministic selection ordering, so the same draw can be reconstructed later and shown to have been random. This matters because the common failure is not bias; it is drift. If a system re-derives the eligible pool at the time of the challenge rather than preserving it, the pool has changed, and the original draw cannot be reproduced no matter how sound the randomization was. An auditable record costs storage and adds steps. It is worth it on the day someone asks the court to prove something.

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Is EmpanelJMS suitable for a small or rural county?

It is built for them. The constitutional obligation to summon a fair cross-section of the community does not scale with population, and neither should the quality of the tools. Small courts are typically offered a cut-down tier of a metropolitan product or asked to manage jury service in a spreadsheet with a login page. EmpanelJMS is the same platform regardless of jurisdiction size; differences between courts live in configuration and data rather than in separate product tiers. A county summoning a few hundred jurors a term gets the same selection integrity, the same audit trail, and the same juror-facing tools as a county summoning tens of thousands.

What about jurors who do not use the internet?

They are planned for, not treated as an exception. Online response rates in small jurisdictions rarely exceed sixty to seventy percent, and in some rural counties they are far lower. The jurors who respond on paper also skew toward the populations a court most needs represented in its pools. EmpanelJMS treats the paper path as a first-class workflow. Returned questionnaires are processed by scanning rather than keying, with a barcode routing each form back to the correct juror record automatically. Jurors can also respond by telephone through the court's existing line with staff entering responses, or through the automated voice line.

How returned paper questionnaires are processed →

What languages does the juror experience support?

The juror portal, the chat assistant, and the automated voice line all operate in the languages the jurisdiction configures. Spanish alongside English is standard, and additional languages are added as configuration rather than as a development project. A juror's language preference is stored on their record and carries across every channel, so a juror who selects Spanish in the portal hears Spanish on the phone line, reads Spanish in chat, and receives notifications in Spanish. The court does not maintain separate translations of the same instruction, and a juror does not have to re-declare their language each time they contact the court.

The full juror response and communication workflow →

How are jurors paid?

EmpanelJMS calculates payment from recorded attendance rather than from a separate process. Per-diem rates are configured per jurisdiction and can be tiered by day of service, so a court paying one rate for the first day and a higher rate afterward is a configuration rather than a workaround. Mileage is calculated at the jurisdiction's rate against a distance the system derives itself: each juror's address is geocoded and the distance to the courthouse is calculated automatically, so staff are not looking up mileage by hand or trusting a figure a juror wrote on a form. Disbursement supports electronic transfer, card-based payment, check, and donation.

Juror payment and electronic disbursement →

Who answers the phone when we call for support?

A person who understands jury management. Picture the moment it matters: a judge is waiting on a jury, a panel needs to go out, and something is not working. A clerk in that position does not have time to open a ticket, reference a case number, or wait for a callback within one business day. So when you call Integrated Jury Solutions, someone answers who already knows what a master wheel is and what it means when a courtroom is held up. The people answering are the same people who build the software, so a defect reported on a call reaches whoever can fix it. Support is included, not a tier.

More on how IJS handles support →

Do you sell a subscription or a perpetual license?

Both. A subscription is an annual fee covering the license, updates, and support, with no capital outlay to start, and it keeps the cost in an operating budget line. A perpetual license means the court buys the software outright and pays an annual maintenance fee for updates and support, which suits a court with capital funds available or no way to add a recurring line item. Most jury software is sold only as a subscription, which can rule a court out on budget mechanics rather than fit. Our subscription agreement also includes a non-appropriation clause, so a county that cannot fund the next fiscal year can end the term without penalty.

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What happens to our data if we leave?

You get it back. On termination or expiry, we return your data in a documented, machine-readable format, destroy it, or both, at your direction. Data is retained for a defined transition period after termination so that a court is never exposed to data loss during migration, and nothing is destroyed until the court confirms it has received and validated its data. Jury operations are a statutory function that cannot be suspended, so data is never withheld as leverage in a commercial dispute. Written certification of destruction is available on request once the final backup containing the data has expired.

Do we need IT staff to run it?

Not for the cloud deployment. We host, patch, monitor, and back up the system, handle certificate renewal and disaster-recovery testing, and your court needs nothing but a browser. For an on-premises deployment your IT department provides and maintains the server, and we support the application the same way we would a hosted installation. Day-to-day administration is designed for court staff either way: adding a location, changing a notification schedule, adjusting pay rates, or editing a summons template does not require a developer. Configuration is the intended path, and when something genuinely cannot be configured we would rather extend the configuration model than fork the code.

Can our staff sign in with our existing accounts (single sign-on)?

Yes. EmpanelJMS supports OpenID Connect single sign-on, including Microsoft Entra ID. It works with any standards-compliant OIDC provider, including current versions of Active Directory Federation Services. Courts standardized on SAML 2.0 should raise it during evaluation so we can confirm the integration path. Single sign-on is configured for each court independently, and a court that does not want it is unaffected. Users are matched on an immutable directory identifier rather than an email address, so a name or address change does not break access. An account must already exist in EmpanelJMS and be explicitly linked before single sign-on will admit it — authenticating with your directory is not by itself authorization to open juror records. Each account is set to single sign-on only, local password only, or either, so a court can put its own staff on SSO exclusively while keeping a small number of local accounts for the case where the identity provider itself is unavailable.

How quickly would you tell us if there were a breach?

Integrated Jury Solutions maintains a written data breach response plan based on NIST Special Publication 800-61, reviewed annually. Incidents are classified on a four-level severity scale, and for the most severe classification — an incident affecting multiple clients — impacted courts are notified within four hours. Lower-severity incidents are notified on a timeline matched to their assessed impact, with that determination documented rather than assumed. A suspected exposure of personally identifiable information is reportable on suspicion alone and does not wait for confirmation. We state a figure rather than saying “promptly” because your own breach-notification obligations under state law do not start until we make the call. Your IT department may request a copy of the plan.

How is court and juror data protected?

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is controlled by role, and jurisdiction scope is enforced from the authenticated session so that a user of one court cannot reach another court's data. Multi-factor authentication is available for staff accounts, documents uploaded through the system are scanned for malware before processing, and application activity is logged to support investigation. Production runs on hardened U.S.-based infrastructure, or on the court's own servers where policy requires it. We maintain written information security, incident response, business continuity, and data retention policies, each reviewed at least annually, and we will provide them for a security review.

Our full approach to security →