Using our Library Voices
Using our Library Voices
Civic Curiosity: The District Clerk's Office
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Welcome to Civic Curiosity, the podcast where we take an in-depth look at the people, and agencies that keep county government running. We begin this series with a conversation with Devonte Hill, Director of Communications and Engagement for the District Clerk's Office, an agency responsible for everything from safeguarding sensitive court records to coordinating juries for trials.
If you've ever been curious about what the government does, and what are all the departments within, we're the series for you! Join us as we explore the important work happening inside one of the county's most vital offices.
Learn more with the library: www.hcpl.net
Created by the Podcast Team at the Harris County Public Library.
www.hcpl.net
Podcast Team Members include: Beth Krippel, John Harbaugh, Mary Mink, Dylan Smith, Sadina Shawver, Alinda Mac, John Schaffer, Jennifer Finch, Katelyn Helberg, Darcy Casavant, Darla Pruitt and Nancy Hu
Ever wonder what local government actually does or who the people are behind the services we use every day? Welcome to Civic Curiosity, where we sit down with local government professionals and to ask, who are you and what do you do? We'll uncover how government really works, down-to-earth conversations that make public service easier to understand and help you discover resources you never knew were available. We're here with Devonta Hill, uh, the Director of Communications and Engagement for the Harris County District Clerk South. Hi, Devontae, how are you? I'm doing well. How about yourself? I'm doing very well. So, all right, I got a lot of questions, a whole lot of questions. Uh we're gonna start I may have answers. Maybe. Tell me a little bit about what is it you do exactly, and then we'll kind of back into the district clerk's office as a whole.
SPEAKER_00Sure. Um, so my role and really an extension in my department is is mainly over all of the messaging from the office, uh, a lot of public information content, you know, whether it means informing people on our services, whether that means any updates if jury service is canceled, um, as well as uh internal communication, making sure the staff is well informed on any policy changes, keeping up with legislator changes. Um, and so it is a lot of different communicating with different audiences, I would say would be the overarching thing that we do. But then we also deal with outreach. I know in some departments outreach is kind of separate from communications. For us, we're hand in hand with outreach. And so we do a lot of uh collaborative work, reaching out to different organizations, doing events, publicity stunts of the other stuff of that nature, and then of course, uh campaigns. Oh, really? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Because I I didn't realize how much the district clerk's office does, like you guys do a whole lot of stuff for the county. Just bullet point at what are the big, the big offices, the big areas of things that you guys do.
SPEAKER_00All right. So I'm gonna break this down into audience groups. Okay, right. So for the legal community, we are the custodians of records and exhibits. And so what does that mean? The records, we have a clerk in every court, and that clerk is is documenting everything that's going on in the court. Anytime there's a motion, anytime uh there needs to be some type of filing, they're the person that you're interacting with, and they're making sure that's in the system. And this is civil and criminal. This is civil and criminal. Um, civil criminal on the district level, and then we do take care of the criminal county courts as well.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00Um, and juvenile in family court. So, yeah, so it's uh a lot of different courts. Vast majority of the courts on the downtown complex area, right? Um, so that's the legal community. Also, if you're trying to, let's say you're working with your clients, um, you're usually accessing our website um to get that uh record to go and you know, whatever it's whether you're looking at uh the different motions that were happening at in the in the recent docket, or you're making sure that something was filed correctly, all that stuff is available for, you know, on the on our website. For the public, non-legal community, the main interaction you have with us would be either you know, for pro se filers, if they're filing for divert divorce or um child support, things of that nature, or jury service. I would say most people kind of know us for jury service, um, summonsing jurors, you know, reconstitution the reconstituting the jury wheel, as well as um, you know, that uh typical questions that people would have in relation to service. Um, those would be the biggest areas. We do have passport services and things like that, but the vast majority has to do with the courts, jury service, uh, and and kind of the secondary services around those two.
SPEAKER_01Okay. How does someone become an expert in communicating all this information? What it was your journey to get here?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's the the short answer to that is you don't.
SPEAKER_01So you say we're all quality.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, it's um it's a collaborative effort, right? It's teamwork is extremely important in a role like this because there's always a bunch of moving parts. And as soon as you figure something out, something changes, right? And so whether it be because of commissioner's court, whether it be because of the Texas legislature, so it's always a fluid ongoing thing. Uh new developments are happening almost on a quarterly basis. And so keeping up of Texas code and all that stuff is extremely important. But how I got into this role is actually kind of random. You know, I uh in general, most people from communications departments, most of them have a background in news. And so I'm I'm like that in a lot of like a lot of folks that you would run into. Um I started off working for Channel 11 um as just a camera op and eventually ended up becoming an MMJ, uh, doing some news stories and hits, and as well as doing some promotional content for Great Day Houston. Um, and then after that, I started working with PBS, uh, helping out with their different political shows, as well as some of their musical shows, helping out the producers in those programs, um, along with the mayoral debates. Did some freelance news journalism uh with Al Jazeera and some other places. And then uh I got a random phone call from a guy who I did a story with, uh, who I surprised he even remembered me. Uh he's like, hey, you know, you did a really good piece. Do you do video on the side? I was like, Yeah, I'm a freelancer. You know, I'd, you know, but I wouldn't say I do video, I tell stories, right? He's like, well, we would need a storyteller for this office um because Marilyn Burgess just recently got elected, and she's looking to fill out her uh her office. So I was like, okay, cool. And so that was my first introduction into working for a government entity of any kind. Um, and at that time, I was a community outreach liaison. So a lot of what I was doing was just reaching out to different organizations, trying to partner with them on projects, and really just tell people the story of the office to the best of my ability there. I didn't realize that that would entail a variety of random things, uh, doing podcasts, right? You know, working on data, you know, and usually newsy folks are not, you know, data analysts. So it's a whole other set of skills that I had to kind of develop. Um, because we were really trying to push for um legislative change. At that time, jury pay was $6 a day. Uh, if you, you know, were called, and then if you were paneled, it was $40. And so one of the things that she ran on was wanting to do something about that to help increase jury participation. And so I was uh heavily involved with gathering data, doing surveys uh throughout the community, working with vendors, uh working with uh the Texas Southern Research Center to collaborate with our data because they were also working on uh opportunity zones. And so we said there might be an opportunity here to cross-reference some of our data to figure out what we're looking at. And so, with all that research and work that was done on that, we were able to pinpoint zip codes that were uh less represented in the jury appearance, and we were able to develop some programs to kind of address some of those, or at least attempt to. Uh, but the biggest thing we were able to do was to push for legislative change to increase that pay. And uh unfortunately, I wasn't here when it finally got changed because government works very slow, and I ended up getting a different opportunity somewhere else. Uh, but when I recently came back, it was already in place. So I was like, oh, perfect. Um and so that that work wasn't in vain. Um, so yeah, and so to that point, I recently came back as the director of communications uh after being a director of marketing at a law firm. And so uh, which working for a law firm showed me the other side of the coin, right? Because we we deal with attorneys and paralegals all the time from the you know the the records end, right, right? But I didn't know any much about the actual filing end of the case or just being an attorney uh or the case of you know from that perspective. So it was really interesting to be able to work directly with them and uh and help out with some of the campaigns we were running nationally. Uh they were predominantly Mastwort uh law firm.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00And so that was really interesting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, uh I like to tell people when people ask me how I got into the work working at the library, uh, because it wasn't my where I had started either. I had started entertainment and you know, living in Los Angeles and then moving back to Houston. And somebody had suggested I apply for a job at the library. And of course I was an English major, so I was like, oh, that makes sense. Sure, it sounds like fun. And I remember going into my interview at the one of the branches, and you know, you get the end of the interview and they asked if I had any questions. And I had, you know, of course, a few, you know, really fancy questions that I'd come up with from my job interview skills. And, you know, I was like, well, you know, on what metrics will I be based on a daily, will I be evaluated on a daily basis? And, you know, how will I be, you know, uh my my performance be assessed? And the branch manager kind of sat back and looked, and she goes, smiles? I love how you talk. You have the experience of something different from working in the private sector, where it is, you know, ultimately all about a product or a service that's being sold to the government, which is all about a service that's being given away or give being, you know, how do we make how do we make your life better e slash easier? And it's uh, what is your take on like how do you do you prefer one or the other? Is it, I mean, because they're they come with different um difficulties and different benefits. What have you balance that going away and back and forth?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's um I'll answer that in two different ways. So on the messaging end in the in the create in the content creation end, uh your verbiage is completely different, right? Like you're you're selling a product or a service for the most part, at least especially dealing with a law firm, you're selling a service. And although we there's a lot of rules and regulations as far as what you can and can't say, like there's there's a lot of advertising rules within the Texas statute. You're it's still a business, right? And at the end of the day, you're trying to get clients because you need to keep the lights on. Versus the the private sector or the public sector, you don't have that worry, right? Yes, we have budget issues and whatnot, but for the most part, you're not measured. Your KPI isn't how much revenue you brought to the business. Your KPI is, you know, what was the uh experience from the end user, right? Uh are we serving the community to the best of our ability, right? So those are the KPIs, which are kind of hard to put on a spreadsheet.
SPEAKER_01When you say KPIs, what do you mean?
SPEAKER_00Sorry, uh so whenever like in marketing, right, when you're uh when you're trying to measure the effectiveness of a campaign, you're looking at these different measurement points that kind of tell you if something performed well or not.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00Right. And so a KPI could be the amount of views you received, okay, right, on a campaign, or whatever the case may be, or like the amount of uh leads you gained. For us, it would be a little different because we're not measuring, we we can measure how many customers that were served a particular day, but that doesn't really have much bearing on our bottom line, if you will. Right. Uh what it does serve is it it serves as a point to use whenever you're trying to justify why we should keep employees or not, right? That is something that, especially in the communications department, not necessarily for the public, but when we're talking to other entities, you know, when we're talking to commissioners' court, these are different things that we have to bring to the table to justify our existence, in a sense. Um, so going back to some of the other parts of the job, you know, it's it's a variety of different audiences, and each audience has their own kind of unique uh problems and solutions that would need to be addressed. Um, and so that would be one of the audiences for the comms department is developing content specifically for you know commissioners court or or other stakeholders.
SPEAKER_01Have you ever talked to younger people coming out of, let's say, uh, you know, community news school or journalism school or news and talk to them and about your job and you know, uh what would you how would you sell them on working for, say, the government or the district clerk's office?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, several years ago, I I went back to, so my alma mater is Stephen F. Austin. Um, so I went back to Stephen F. Austin to speak at a media day. And um I gave them both perspectives. I was like, I, you know, this is my experience working in news, um, but then this is also my experience working for a government entity. And what I typically tell young folks uh is A, the industry is completely different than what it was even when I graduated. Um, social media was out, but it was not nearly at the level that it was today. Um and in the influence it has, as well as independent journalists, right? Like you had podcasters and things of that nature, but now that is kind of the forefront. Like if you're looking, especially if you're trying to do a campaign, right? Most likely you're trying to reach out to influencers to get audience, right? That wasn't really a thing back then in 2010. Um so uh I would say, you know, this is a it's an open space to really be creative, uh, working for a city or a county government. Uh it is fast-paced, kind of like news. So for those who do have that news background, it you will see that being very familiar. You know, that should feel kind of used to you. You know, you should be used to that. But the the cool thing about it is uh you get to craft stories that really have impact, right? Like sometimes in news you would want to tell a story and you can't do it because you know that individual or that company is a is a big sponsor, and you know, there might be some legal problems and they don't really want to touch all that. And you know, it's like, well, this is a really cool story. Um when it comes to working for like a county or or or city, you know, you can address some of these problems, right? If there was a big water leak somewhere, you can address that, right? You can craft stories to educate people on some of those issues. If there does need to be a change, you can't necessarily advocate, but you can inform people on, hey, if you do want to make a change to this, this is kind of the mechanism to go about making that change. Obviously, we do have rules and guardrails, but um the work is very meaningful. Um, and that's kind of really the point that I typically push is if you're a type of person that really cares about the work you do and and and the impact you can make on the people that you you live around, you know, working for the government could do that for you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's that was been that's been exactly my experience with you know working in the library system, how you know you realize there's a point when you get to like, oh my gosh, we do all this stuff, and it's we're here to do all these things, and it's just we're just trying to help and make things better, which is such a neat, a neat way of looking at it. Right. Would you say there are uh any um going back, you know, talking to you know, younger people or you know, somebody that may be looking for a position in say the clerk or government or the district clerk's office, are there certain skills that maybe you need more in the in this sector versus say the private sector? Are there any type of uh, you know, is it really come down to just who you wanna uh what you want to how you want to feel at the end of the day? Or um you do need a lot of empathy.
SPEAKER_00You know, a lot of folks, especially for this office, right? I was I'll speak on the district clerk's office. Most people are not in the best of mood uh when they're interacting with our office. I mean, you're you're going through a divorce, right? You're going through child custody, you know, you're you're you're fighting with opponents. Like this is not happy go lucky, right? And so you do have to have a lot of, you have to give people a lot of grace and you have to be really empathetic to the you know the situations that people are going through, real life situations that are, you know, have massive impact on their life. Um, and for some individuals that can be really hard, but if you if you kind of already have that level of empathy in you, this this would be a really good spot for you. Uh, because that's needed. You know, it we we need people who are patient because you know, people are not in their best day, and they're so grateful when you are. You know, the conversations we have of our customer service team, you know, when you give people really good service on a day that they just do one of the worst days in their life, that has so much meaning to them. Um, and unfortunately, a lot of those individuals don't want to speak on camera, so we can't really capture some of those moments.
SPEAKER_01It's hard to tell those stories.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like those that's like gold, right? But a lot of times, you know, it's like, hey, look, I don't want to be known for that. You know, I'm I was just here just to handle business, and now that business is done, and I want to go home and just live on, you know, do the rest of my life. You know, I those are good moments that that you kind of keep as nuggets. And some of it's really complicated. You know, like uh some of our clerks who are dealing with really traumatic situations, like people who are going through domestic violence, you know, for them, they need a decompression period. They have all the empathy in the world, but sometimes you internalize those things and you take that home and you have to deal with that. And so um, it's not for the weak, not necessarily for this particular office, but just because of the nature of what we work with, you know, it'd be different if you were like Tanisha, where you know we're dealing with you know birth certificates and you're talking about Tanisha Hudsmith. Yes, the county clerk. Yeah, you know, she has the good stuff, right? She has, hey, you just bought a house. Congratulations, right? You just had a baby. All right, you're congratulations, you got divorced.
SPEAKER_01I mean, she does do elections, so I would say that some might say she doesn't have it as good. That can be kind of a dividend. You know, I mean, elections can be a little, sometimes they get a little complicated. So that's true.
SPEAKER_00I'm just poking fun. We we love her. We have a great relationship.
SPEAKER_01Well, so we just mentioned Tanisha Hudsbuth, who is not the uh the director of your department, your uh uh your clerk's office. She's the uh the county clerk. She's the county clerk. Yeah, you are the district clerk, yes. Of course, you have a different boss who we're gonna talk, and you mentioned who was also elected, uh Marilyn Burgess. And you mentioned Commissioner's Court earlier. One thing I don't think people realize in all of these these county offices, our bosses change every few years, or you know, they have to go through elections. So what is that like?
SPEAKER_00It has its challenges. I I would say it's it's not unique. You know, in the private sector, you know, CEOs get dethroned all the time and are replaced by other people. Your boss will get replaced. So in in a lot of um instances, it's very similar to that, right? There's gonna be an adjustment period. Uh, the the the goals and missions that your current boss has not necessarily are what the goals and missions of the next uh person who's who's taking office. And so there is gonna be an adjustment period that a lot of people have to go through. And like for instance, with the judges, you have to re-establish relationship with them. And uh some of them may have had uh extensive court experience, some of them may have not. And so it causes a little bit of delays sometimes in the first couple of months to kind of get them up to speed. And then also we have to fill each other out. You know, every judge likes things differently. Um, and so the clerks have to figure and navigate through that space. But yeah, we're gonna be, we're gonna have a new district clerk come next year, uh, and that's gonna have its uh its adjustment. Um, it's not necessarily a political office, but there are party lines that express themselves. And some people may, you know, lose employment because of party lines, which is very unfortunate. And I wish things were not like that, but uh that's kind of the reality of this you know, this particular space. Not the case for all for every county office, but what I usually tell folks, especially for those that are very concerned, is uh usually if you're very talented, people want to keep you around, right? Um, and so I usually focus on the work and I tell people to focus on the work and focus on what matters and what's important, uh, and keep that in mind and do your best every day. Show up every day. And, you know, when that another person comes in, you know, embrace the change, try to see where they're coming from and see where there's some common ground and make the most of it. Because at the end of the day, the most important thing is Harris County, right? The most important thing is the residents and serving the residents. You know, their other stuff is secondary.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so uh a day in the life. Like what's on your plate right now? What are some of the things the clerk's office you guys have coming up? I know we have you said elections coming. I mean, you know, this year is an election year. What are some of the things that are like weighing weighing on your on your inbox right now? What are you working on?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so uh we got done with a lot of really big projects recently. You usually have a lot of events in the top of the year. Coming up, you know, a lot of it is setting foundation. You know, we uh we're gonna have a new person. And so we're kind of in an audit phase where we're like, okay, what are some things that are working well? What are some things that are not working well? What are things that we can change now? And what are some things that we might need to wait for the next administration to change? And uh one of the biggest things that we're trying to do is really push our online services, making sure that people, A, can navigate our website, you know, they know where things are. If there are some problems with navigation, working with our IT department to address some of those issues. And then making sure that people are aware of all the great things you can do on the website. I mean, coming to the downtown complex can be very challenging, right? Uh you have to deal with one way streets. If you're not familiar with one way streets, you gotta deal with Parking, there's traffic. And so to avoid all of that, right? To relieve all that burden, right? Just go to the website and you know, you can do almost 90% of the things that you need to do at the office. There are obviously some situations where you have to physically come here, but uh we try to avoid that as much as possible because we understand all the burden that comes with traveling down here.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00Um, especially if you're in like Umble or Pasadena, where it is a drive, right? And so we're mindful of those things. Um but those are a lot of what we're doing now are internal tweaks, trying to improve our processes and um definitely improving our uh our education content.
SPEAKER_01What can people find on your website? What can they get done on the website?
SPEAKER_00Sure. So um if you're just a regular civilian person, regular regular Joe. Right. I'll I'll address different groups. So for a regular civilian person, uh the the biggest thing is if you get a summons in the mail, going to our website to pre-register is extremely important, mainly because it allows you to get alerts, right? One of the best things that I'm glad that was instituted when I left, it's in place now, is uh whenever there is a cancellation, let's say it happens the night before or the morning of, you will get an email and a text message saying, hey, you know, it's been canceled today, you know, you've served your service, you know, don't show up here, right? And you can save the trip, right? You will you're not gonna receive those notifications if you don't pre-register. And so those are one of the big the biggest things with that. On the other end of it, and I did this personally, I researched people, right? So you can do background checks on our website. And so if there's a neighbor that sounds, you know, it's kind of sketchy to you, you can type their name in and see if they have a record or not. As long as they've lived in Harris County for an extended period of time, it's pretty comprehensive uh for those set of individuals. Obviously, if they're transient, not so much. But it's a valuable service. It's free. Right? And so uh being able to do background checks, um, you know, my I I joke sometimes a lot when I'm when I'm talking to students and whatnot. It's like, hey, you know, those stories that your grandparents will tell you uh, you know, when they were getting divorced and stuff, you can actually look into their records to see if they are actually telling the truth or not, you know. Uh, and so that's kind of cool to be able to look into that. And so a lot of uh research as far as uh records is concerned, the general populace uh can really take advantage of. For the legal community, there's a whole other set of suites uh of tools and software um that are accessible to them in relation to helping with their case flow and and um and working up their cases. Uh I'm not gonna go into too much detail on that, but uh they're familiar with that.
SPEAKER_01I mean, but that's the legal information. They're familiar with that.
SPEAKER_00They're working with that stuff every day, right? Um but for the general populace, yeah, definitely the jury service, pre-registration, uh looking up people do the background checks, you know, looking at uh different records, either for yourself or for family members, are probably the biggest highlights of the website.
SPEAKER_01So before Thanksgiving, check out the website, get all the deets on the family. Yes. And also then before you move to a new location or after you get off the dating sites, check that. Check the criminal background.
SPEAKER_00I said this to my cousin, you know, when when she was you know dating, and and I was like, hey, you know, just put the plug their name in just to make sure there's, you know, they're in the clear. Because you don't know who you're dealing with, right? So just check on the website first. There you go.
SPEAKER_01I know roughly the county has roughly 20,000 you know employees. How big is the the district clerk's office? Like how many roughly how many people, uh, how many offices, because you have multiple locations. Right. What are we uh what are we talking size-wise? When you talk about some of these changes and how big this is, this is a it's a it's a large operation.
SPEAKER_00It is. And I mentioned earlier that we're understaffed. So when I say we have 575 employees, that is under the assumption that we're understaffed. So really, we I guess should be floating around 600. The other thing is because of the new courts that we have to uh develop, which will be taking place later on this year, there's gonna be an additional uh staff assigned to those courts. So it's gonna be bigger than that. Um and so yeah, it's it's about roughly 600 employees and then plus more once once those new courts are online. Uh and that is encompassing everyone. That's the the clerks that are in the court, that's intake, people who are helping attorneys and paralegals with their filing processes. Um, that's our data control, who are making sure that when something is filed, it's filed correctly. And if there does need to be a correction, they're making those corrections. That's our ID department that's behind our website, that's behind a lot of the software that we use, that the attorneys are using uh to give people access to data. It's imaging, you know, the people who are taking physical paper and turning it into a digital uh platform that people can have access to. A lot of the more recent documents are all electronic, but we still have cases from like 1980 or 1990 that are still paper, right? So we still have a portion of our staff trying to go through all of those cases to digitize them.
SPEAKER_01We're at 201 Carolina.
SPEAKER_00201 Caroline.
SPEAKER_01This is in the civil courts building.
SPEAKER_00That's a civil, yeah, it's a civil courthouse.
SPEAKER_01Actually, I want to talk about this room we're in. This is just kind of just one of the small, or not small, but one of the many different things your office takes care of. Is tell me about this room that we're in right now.
SPEAKER_00This used to be an active room, the room that we're currently in, where we had a bunch of different files of old cases. Uh, it's no longer being used that way now, it's more of kind of for decoration. But um this is kind of what it used to look like uh back when it was active. And uh right now, these this room is currently being used during tours. Whenever we have high school students or college students come in to tour the office, we usually bring them into this room to talk about kind of the our historical record uh projects and some history on famous cases involving Sam Houston and and uh and Gray, some of the names that you see along around downtown. And uh Frank can talk about those things. Frank is our historian, and he's he's amazing.
SPEAKER_01Well, you can imagine, I mean, the sheer volume of history surrounding Harris County when you look at every criminal, every civil court case dating back to 18 or something, 18, whatever.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Uh Harris County was in existence before the state of Texas was.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's unbelievable. And you guys are that's that's your bailiwick. That's your guys are in charge of that. So we're excited. We're gonna talk more about that on a different podcast, but we want to make sure you stick around for that. Um, what has surprised you the most about your role and the office?
SPEAKER_00You know, I I what still kind of surprises me is is the amount of work that still has to be done on telling people who the what the district clerk's office is and and and what we do. You know, I for years, you know, I was out in the community doing those things, and and now the person that's in that position is Sandra, and she's she's great. Um, but it's it's still surprising to me how many people still don't know the office. Um and so it's it's a surprise, but it's also an interesting challenge that I am excited about because then I can kind of retell some stories that um I might think, oh, that's an old story. Why would you know we've already said that? Well, maybe not. You know, maybe this is uh an entirely different group of people who need to know that story again.
SPEAKER_01Devante, thank you so, so much for talking to us. Uh, really excited about uh this whole series and all the people we're gonna get a chance to talk to. But I'm glad we got a chance to talk to you first to kind of get an overview of the district clerk's office. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00It's been my pleasure. You guys are amazing. I I love the library, and I I wish people would utilize the library more. You guys are amazing.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much.