In the past 14 plus years I have seen conference calls used in a variety of applications that I would not have thought of myself. As people in different industries became familiar with conference calls and how they worked, they developed applications within their businesses themselves. One of the applications that uses conference calls very effectively is in the court system.
Many of you may have heard of or seen the application of video conferencing in the court system where a defendant is able to appear before a judge without the need to leave the jail and appear in person. Well, it seems there is a place for conference calls as well. Our company was approached by a court clerk about the possibility of using conference calls to allow attorneys, defendants and litigants to appear before a judge without the need to physically appear in the courtroom. With the very crowded legal system it was thought that this would save valuable court time and offer advantages to the participants as well. So, we designed a method of bringing people before the judge in an orderly fashion and it saved the judge the time and effort of getting in front of the participants. Because, in many areas of the country a judge appears in several court rooms across a wide area because they do not have a dedicated judge for the court. And many of the appearances are pre-trial non-evidentiary appearances that do not require an in person appearance. Thus the court conference call was born.
This practice still exists today and is widely used in many parts of the country. It has saved countless hours of time and energy for the courts, attorneys and their clients. The way it works is a conference call is set up for the participants on the date and time of their appearance. The attorneys and their clients dial into the conference call and the judge will go through the courts docket over the conference call just as if the participants were in the courtroom. Everyone agrees to appear on the telephone a head of time and the conference call can be attended from anywhere. The clients save money because the attorney does not take all day to go to the court to attend a minor proceeding that otherwise only takes a few minutes.
Sometimes the best conference call applications are the ones that the customers think up for themselves.