2000 Director’s Awards Recognize Judiciary Employees
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has announced the winners of the 2000 Director’s Awards, the federal courts’ highest awards for employees.
Brenda K. Argoe, clerk of court for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of South Carolina, is the sole recipient of the 2000 Director’s Award for Outstanding Leadership.
The winners of the Judiciary’s Director’s Award for Excellence in Court Operations are Jesse D. Cannon Jr., assistant circuit executive for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; Barry K. Lander, clerk of court for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of California; and F. Dan Wieser, U.S. probation officer for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Nominations for the awards come from members of the court family.
The Director’s Award for Outstanding Leadership, given this year to Brenda Argoe, recognizes managerial employees among the Judiciary’s more than 26,000 employees who have made long-term contributions to increase program effectiveness or reduce administrative costs. As the judges from her court noted in nominating Argoe, “She has made, and continues to make, valuable contributions in the areas of effective management, positive work environment, improved productivity, efficient utilization of financial resources, and good public relations, all of which reflect favorably on the court system. Her leadership, devotion, hard work, and intelligence have earned the respect of the public, her staff, her peers, and those in the Administrative Office who work with her on a regular basis and who utilize her resources in seeking effective management of the court system.”
Under Argoe’s management, the clerk’s office in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of South Carolina not only has operated below budget during the past three fiscal years, it has also improved services and benefits to the court. The bankruptcy judges of the district nominated Argoe for a host of contributions including early implementation of a pilot state-of-the-art financial accounting system; pioneering work in offering a case imaging system to internal court customers and external customers over the court’s PACER webpage that eliminates the need to physically retrieve a case file; implementation of an automated calendaring tool program that schedules hearings and produces weekly court calendars, minute and appearance sheets; and a program of staff training and development that has produced a highly skilled work force.
The 2000 Director’s Award for Excellence in Court Operations, recognizes outstanding achievements in improving the operation of federal courts. Winning nominations must be for a specific operations improvement that resulted in cost savings, increased productivity, improved customer service and judicial efficiencies. Three recipients were chosen this year.
In announcing the awards, Administrative Office Director, Leonidas Ralph Mecham said, “Our award winners obviously are people for whom their work is more than a job. They are enthusiastic and dedicated, and typically give more than 100 percent to every project they take on. They help the federal Judiciary run more efficiently, be more effective, and give better service.”
As the Fifth Circuit’s assistant circuit executive for space and facilities management, Jesse D. Cannon, Jr. assists circuit, district and bankruptcy courts in identifying space requirements, planning space, developing scopes of work, providing drawings, acquiring space, monitoring construction projects through completion, reviewing requests for renovation and alteration of space, and monitoring space funding. His services have resulted in the more timely delivery of space at a lower cost to the government. His coordination of the many space projects has increased productivity while producing outstanding court facilities. Over the last decade he has been involved in the careful renovation of an historic courtroom in Beaumont, Texas; the design and construction of three new courthouses in the Southern District of Texas; the installation of electronic courtrooms in the Western and Middle Districts of Louisiana and the Northern District of Mississippi; and remodeling and expansion in district and bankruptcy courts throughout the Fifth Circuit.
Barry K. Lander, clerk of court for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of California, was nominated for the award by the district’s bankruptcy judges because of “his wide-ranging suggestions for innovations and improvements to the electronic case filing (ECF) program, which have not only improved local use of the system and saved significant expense for our court but also resulted in transferable technology now used by other courts.” Lander assisted in adding a bankruptcy noticing function to ECF, an improvement that has eliminated the need to manually docket and then scan about 15,000 entries and images per year for his court alone. All prototype courts in ECF now have this function. He also identified other changes to ECF that improved accuracy in entering creditor information, efficiency in collecting fees, and that identified closed cases and relationships between associated cases. Lander was involved in the development of programs that ease searches for case files and that automatically assign meetings for judges and trustees. He also has produced detailed training materials for court staff.
F. Dan Wieser, Jr., U.S. probation officer in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, received a Director’s Award for his contributions to the automation of probation operations, within the Middle District of Florida and nationally. Among many projects, he wrote the program for and then aided in the development of a national probation case management system, and assisted in the development of an automated program for tracking deadlines for presentence report processing. Wieser developed a program probation officers could use to do a “least intrusive” search of a computer owned by person/s under supervision whose computer online time or use had been restricted by the court. He also wrote a manual to assist probation officers in the use of the Internet as an investigative resource, and helped develop web programs to extract data from the Probation Automated Case Tracking Program. These contributions were made while Wieser was a line supervision officer carrying a full workload.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts was created by Congress in 1939. Under the direction and supervision of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the AO serves and supports the federal Judiciary. It provides legal services, policy advice, and administrative and program assistance; monitors legislation affecting federal court operations and personnel; and recommends plans and strategies to manage court business efficiently. Among the support services the AO provides are the procurement of supplies and equipment, the administration of personnel, budget, and financial control services; and the compilation and publication of statistics on the volume and distribution of court business.
|
