Our support lines in our special positions, and we have a number of positions that are either soon to be posted, have already been posted during validation, or somewhere down the process.

In the coming months, we are excited to transition many of our talent acquisition responsibilities from the Bureau of Human Resources to the PD's office.

That proposal is in front of the compliance office in the OIIG.

That transition will allow for us to continue to work on the hiring process as speed to the prior process.

And we don't want to just go fast for fast sake.

We want to be able to pick from the best candidates.

And we know that the best candidates have options and speed is integral to that process.

So I want to thank the Bureau of Human Resources and the President's Office for their commitment in finding solutions to problems that we've been working on for a long time that we've already seen lots of solutions to.

So as we think about our spending, it's also important to note that we are lean.

Our 95% of our budget goes towards staffing as compared to smaller numbers at the sheriff and state's attorney's office.

There's no fluff in our budget.

But not only are we lean, um, we have a budget that does not, you know, it's it's not the same as some of our other partners.

Uh with that said, uh, we know that we want to continue to provide the best services that we can.

And as we think about our spending, it's also important to note that although we represent uh clients in the second largest county uh in uh uh the second largest court system in the United States, um, there are several offices out there, similar to the public defender's office that has that have a little bit of a larger budget.

Again, our goal is not to meet budgets of other offices.

Our goal is to uh provide uh the highest level of service we can, and we do that really through um meeting the minimum workload standards that are out there.

Um and and on the minimum workload standards, um, really over the past five years, the president and the board has been committed uh to closing the gap and getting us at a place where we can meet those minimum standards, but to answer the questions about how we get there after a very competitive procurement process.

Thanks, Rafi, and your team.

Uh the law office has contracted with the RAN Corporation to conduct a comprehensive and localized workload study.

Uh the RAN Corporation has been nationally recognized for developing workload standards that reflect modern criminal defense practice.

Um they're great at defining professional and ethical responsibilities.

And RAN was a really excellent choice because they've helped to uh work on the previous national standards, and they're working with large offices like LA County, the Maryland State system.

Right now, they're in phase one, which is gathering the general number of cases we have and applying them to the previous national standards.

However, their goal is to go far deeper, a far more academic study that includes a local time study, a review of current practices, more complex categorization of the types of cases that we handle, and interviews from experts, review of the local legal system, and together they will produce a far more detailed um number when it comes to uh where we need to be at when it comes to staffing.

The simple um statistical analysis of that phase one initially reflects uh a pretty shocking number um that we need 303 attorneys to meet those minimum standards for actually adult criminal cases only.

This is a this is a heavy number.

Um this is an initial analysis.

Um, and uh but it's important to note that that initial analysis does not include all of the work that we do.

With that said, we recognize that a fully staffed constitutional compliant public defender's office will require lots of different staff, um, a number of staff, but we also understand that we need to um be committed to incremental investments each year to work to those minimum standards, and we thank the board and we thank the president's office for working with us to continue to make those incremental investments.

We also know that staffing gaps exist outside of the attorney levels.

Um, so it's also important to note where we are at with investigators and paralegals and other specialists, and the next slide will talk a little bit about that work.

Uh the parallels are are still, we're still working to get those ratios to national standards, but we thank the board uh for helping us move uh down that pathway.

You know, as we continue to work on staffing, uh those staffing issues are compounded, compounded by ever-changing legal landscape, including an explosion in digital discovery.

We've been talking about this for a few years.

Um in our FY25 budget hearing, we showed you a pretty similar chart uh covering 20 to 23.

At that time, we were handling 267 uh terabytes of data.

Uh in just 18 months, our digital discovery, the amount of data we're storing for cases have exploded to one petabyte.

Um, when I was told what what when somebody said what is one petabyte, or do you know what one petabyte was?

Uh I said, No, I don't.

So uh Nico, uh our uh associate director for data uh did a great job explaining for me, explaining it to me.

Uh one terabyte is one thousand terabytes.

What is one thousand terabytes?

That's eighteen million USB flash drives worth of data.

Uh to put that in context, if you put the USBs on the ground, uh that list, that line would stretch 37 miles.

It would uh stretch from my fellow alumni, Commissioner Britton's district in Gunco to Commissioner McCaskill's district in Pullman.

It would run 37 miles, it would go through Commissioner Marita, Gaynor, Degnan, then Vasquez, then Scott, then Anaya, then I think Scott again, uh then Commissioner Stance, Larry Daly, my commissioner, more, and then McCaskill.

Uh we're saying we're saying this because it's a tremendous amount of data.

Um it's a ton of video, and that's video that must be reviewed by our attorneys because the stakes are incredibly high.

We know that Cook County has been named the wrongful conviction capital of the United States.

Illinois makes up about 15% of the wrongful conviction cases nationwide.

And quite frankly, it's not just about wrongful convictions, it's about stopping them before they happen.

Despite popular opinion, just because someone is charged with the crime does not mean they're guilty.

Even the SAO's dashboard indicates about 60% of felonies ending convictions.

That means 40% of the felonies that the SAO brings on the system does not result in a conviction.

That's not a flaw in the system.

That is the system.

We live in an adversarial system where allegations do not necessarily mean that something happened, that we live in a community that there is harm, but every allegation isn't true.

Many of those dismissals and diversions and acquittals are the result of the hard work of our defenders.

Put simply, public defense protects against wrongful convictions and excessive sentencing and police misconduct.

But let's put a real story to the numbers.