It’s not because Mohammed Al Rawi's mission within the justice system is complete; it’s more that other offices like his need the sort of help they simply can’t afford through traditional tech procurements.
In 2019, Al Rawi joined the Public Defender’s Office from the county’s Department of Parks and Recreation, where he was behind the life-saving implementation of the automated drowning detection system. He quickly realized that the work he would be doing in the justice space would be more challenging and impactful than anything he had taken on before.It used to be that the largest and oldest Public Defender’s Office in the country needed a crew of forklift operators to access the millions of paper records it stored in the county warehouse. It was slow, often taking a week to get the files that attorneys needed to defend their clients, and worse, it was unfair, the outgoing CIO told Industry Insider — California.
That process ultimately meant that the attorneys representing some of the county's most vulnerable were forced to choose between navigating a cumbersome and outdated analog process amid an ever-increasing workload rather than mounting a holistic defense for their clients.
“I have seen so many innocent people go through the system, and with the help of a public defender, they were exonerated. And it's one of the most inspiring missions I have seen, and meaningful public services that I have seen,” he said.
In the county’s case, the push to modernize this system had the money and skill necessary to gradually introduce the kinds of tech that would have real-world benefits for the people the office serves. Other counties aren’t so lucky, and many can’t afford the big-name platforms that would allow their attorneys the time they need to provide a human-focused defense, Al Rawi said.
“My focus was, how can we reverse engineer a century worth of data collection that is focused on the calendar, the case and the offense to be focused on the person and the personal history, and how can we create a system that can help the public defenders with their mission, which is telling the story of the human standing before them,” Al Rawi said.
The next phase of Al Rawi’s career comes with the same passion and sense of public service, but for the first time in 15 years, he’ll be helping governments move mountains from the outside with his own purpose-built technology.
Al Rawi and his team tried to share the advancements they made in L.A. with other public defenders’ offices. The response was often that they’d love to adopt the advancements, but simply couldn’t afford the price tags that came with larger systems.
“It was demoralizing to see,” Al Rawi said.
In 2020, Al Rawi assembled a team of technologists and public defenders to build out a custom cloud-based case management system called ZLS, a truncation of “zealous” and a nod to the sense of duty public defenders feel toward their work. The company has offices in eight states and has grown to the point where Al Rawi’s leadership is needed on a full-time basis.
“It was a dream. I was very fortunate to have a very passionate group of people who believe — technologists and legal experts — that have the stamina to put up with this because this was bootstrapped,” he said. “We wanted to do it at our own pace, because this is not meant to be making insane amounts of money in a quick time. It has to be like a mission-driven labor of love type of thing.”
Al Rawi’s final day as a government employee will be Aug. 29, but his work in this space is far from over.
“I will continue to support public defenders. I will still have that proud mission in and sense of mission that I carried, and I was so grateful to be able to do at PD, but I will also have the time to support and focus on my family as well,” he said.
