JC/AOC staffer, JoAnna P. Deering, recently spoke with Jeff Comlin, MBA, PMP, CSM, the new Director of Information Technology for the Court of Appeals of Georgia.
Edited and condensed for clarity.
JoAnna Deering: Good afternoon, Jeff, and congratulations on your new position as the Director of Information Technology for the Court of Appeals of Georgia. Can you tell us about your career path and what led to your current role?
Jeff Comlin: Sure, I’ve been working in IT for 25+ years. I started my career as a help desk representative in the private sector, moving up the ladder to roles as systems administrator, project manager, and then product innovation, before becoming Director of Information Technology. Along the way, I began taking on side projects handling product development and innovation for companies who wanted to utilize emerging technologies, such as the blockchain and AI, to solve various business problems. I worked at a company involved in the logistics of high-level art that was frequently in transit for display at various galleries. During transport, artwork was often damaged, leading to challenges around fraud and insurance claims. I was tasked with identifying solutions to address these issues and subsequently developed a blockchain proof of concept (PoC) that tracked the entire life cycle of art.
JoAnna Deering: That’s interesting. I have been reading about how blockchain technology is used in the diamond industry to link a diamond’s physical characteristics to a unique digital asset, logging every stage of its journey—from mine to consumer—on a distributed ledger to provide consumers with verifiable proof of origin and a guarantee of ethical sourcing. I’ve never met anyone who’s worked with the blockchain.
Jeff Comlin: The diamond industry was one of the use cases I studied for that project. You try to find a use case, and even with the technologies employed at the Court of Appeals, I try to figure out what makes sense to basically solve problems.
JoAnna Deering: So, what prompted your move from fine art in the private sector to courts in the public sector?
Jeff Comlin: I never thought I’d be working in the legal arena. I’m originally from Boston and, as I said, my background consisted of working for corporate startups and other companies in the private sector. While working at a startup in Boston, I had the opportunity to relocate to Georgia to continue my role remotely. Unfortunately, I was laid off shortly after the move due to company restructuring. After the corporate layoff, I attended a job fair and was hired as the Director of Court Information Systems for the Northeastern Judicial Circuit in Hall County. From there, I started networking and that’s how I found my role here at the Court of Appeals.
JoAnna Deering: That’s interesting. What are the primary responsibilities and challenges you face in your role?
Jeff Comlin: I would say just trying to learn the organization and identify what challenges the Court currently has and how we can bridge that gap between technology to overcome those challenges. When I started here at the Court, I went to the different chambers and asked the judges and their staff a series of questions. What do you like about IT? What’s good? What’s serving you, and what can be improved upon?
JoAnna Deering: So, you identify the pain points that the various stakeholders may have and then work to resolve those issues?
Jeff Comlin: Yes, exactly. At first, everyone says there’s nothing wrong, everything’s great. However, once you start talking and having a conversation, people begin to open up quite a bit and communicate the types of problems they encounter with technology. Having these kinds of conversations allows me to uncover a lot of good stuff and really helps create a roadmap for the work that I do.
JoAnna Deering: What motivates you in your work and what do you find most rewarding about this role?
Jeff Comlin: I really enjoy solving problems, and I am very passionate about helping people. In our department, we do support IT tools, but we’re also extremely customer service oriented. We are essentially service providers who fulfill requested deliverables The Court, the Judges, and their staff are our customers, and we strive to provide exceptional customer service.
JoAnna Deering: Absolutely. How do you ensure the security and privacy of sensitive court data?
Jeff Comlin: We have implemented different types of procedures and policies to determine what is and isn’t sensitive information. We perform encryption and require multifactor authentication, meaning that when someone logs in, there is a device or something else that will authenticate the user, so there are two parts to authentication. Our access control policies ensure that users have limited access to the system based on their roles. They do not have access to more information than is necessary to perform their respective jobs.
JoAnna Deering: What measures are in place to protect the court’s IT infrastructure from cyber threats?
Jeff Comlin: We utilize firewalls, threat protection, and make sure that we can track activity that appears out of the ordinary. This allows us to stay ahead of anything that looks atypical, such as repeated login attempts, and perform logging audits, and the like.
JoAnna Deering: Are there emerging technologies that are going to make court procedures and protocols more efficient in the future?
Jeff Comlin: There are. It’s interesting here at the Court of Appeals right now. Governor Kemp has issued a directive to move applications and data to the cloud. Some State agencies have already done so successfully, but the Court of Appeals is not yet fully there. Nonetheless, we’re moving forward deliberately to shrink our carbon footprint and become more cloud driven. Once that is accomplished, we will assess how work is performed and review the related workflows. Right now, a lot of the chambers and different departments sort of work in silos. We are trying to figure out where those workflow breakdowns occur and how we’re going to resolve the issues.
JoAnna Deering: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your first few months here at the Court of Appeals?
Jeff Comlin: My time here has been wonderful. Everyone has been fantastic and very welcoming. Currently, we are working on fixing the house, getting us into the cloud solution, and then we will have a better view of the challenges we and the lower courts face. The lower courts are the ones sending information to the Court of Appeals during the appellate process. They must satisfy their stakeholders that everything is documented and recorded correctly so that the appellate judges can review cases, hear arguments, and be fully prepared to issue opinions. I want to figure out how we can better serve those lower courts in the 159 Georgia counties because they are also our customers along with the Court of Appeals.
JoAnna Deering: Switching gears, what do you like to do when you’re not working?
Jeff Comlin: I enjoy going to the gym, playing golf, and diving into books on leadership and history. I’m especially interested in the Civil War, World War II, and—as a Boston native—the Revolutionary War. I live in Flowery Branch with my wife, and we have twin boys who recently graduated from high school here in Georgia. They’re now studying at Georgia Southern University and enjoying the college experience, while my wife and I are getting used to life as empty nesters.
