The Alliance Strikes back…..

Posted on February 11, 2011


From MetNews

Former Los Angeles Superior Court Presiding Judge Robert A. Dukes yesterday sent an email to his judicial colleagues sharply criticizing Court of Appeal Justice Terence L. Bruiniers of the First District, Div. Five, for defending the California Case Management System in light of the scathing audit of the project made public Tuesday.

More from Courthouse News


While you can read the remainder of the article in the link supplied, Judge Horan makes a particularly damning point. Last year and who knows how many millions of dollars ago, Bruniers fought this audit with the objective that it never take place. Today he claims that the most damaging audit I’ve ever seen contained “no criticisms of CCMS on a conceptual level” and goes on to state “my job here is to try to establish some credibility here, but whether I have any or not remains to be seen.”

Sir, you cannot have any credibility with your current vendor as your vendor is not credible. Does the LAUSD payroll debacle establish your vendors’ credibility? How about the RICO complaint against them out of Marin County? Does being, what, 5 years late on this project establish their credibility? What establishes your vendors’ credibility? While I understand that BearingPoint wrote the first systems, BearingPoint people became Deloitte people when Deloitte bought them in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However, the people on the AOC project transferred directly from BearingPoint to Deloitte years before that.

There are three reasons to pause the program prior to rolling it out to additional courts.

1. The technology landscape has changed dramatically and so have commercial case management systems that are commercially available – at a fraction of the cost of CCMS.

2. You hired a consulting company with no product except consulting and you are only purchasing what they are selling you. They are not selling you CCMS. They are selling their consulting services and you keep buying those services like there is no tomorrow.

3. There is no money to pay for further development or to migrate courts to this system without robbing it from the trial courts. Before rolling out another court (and coming to the eventual decision that you need V5 to correct the deficiencies of 1,2,3 & 4) why don’t you fix the courts and migrate the courts already on the other screwed up editions of CCMS rather than double-down on a pair of twos? Who owns the previous mismanagement and how are they being held responsible?

To earn credibilty, one does not go conducting an end-run and changing the rules of the court to empower court executive officers to make these decisions in the stead of voter- accountable constitutonal officers. Nor do they continue to advertise “We’re that close” with a never ending propaganda campaign that is all words and no product.

To utilize a favorite colloquialism Sir, Shit or get off the pot.