New McHenry court chief wants to move fast

Former British Prime Minister William Gladstone said more than a century ago that "Justice delayed is justice denied."

As he enters his first full month as McHenry County's new court administrator, James "Dan" Wallis is taking that quote to heart.

Speeding up the county's sometimes notoriously slow court system is among the items at the top of Wallis' agenda as he takes over the post responsible for overseeing the administrative and personnel tasks for the county's 22nd Judicial Circuit.

Wallis replaces Louis Czarny, who retired from the court administrator's job last month after 30 years of service to the county.

Among his goals is develop strategies to measure how cases move through the county's legal system and what can be done to make the process more efficient and less time consuming.

"That's going to be a project," Wallis said Friday. "You can swing it too far the other way as well, so it's a matter of finding the happy medium."

Finding that medium, he said, is especially important in criminal cases in which victims' lives can be on hold while waiting for an outcome.

"The last thing you want is for those cases to drag on unnecessarily," Wallis said.

Also on the agenda, Wallis said, are efforts to improve communication within the legal system by, among other things, setting up a local intranet system to share information among court workers.

Wallis joins McHenry County with 19 years of courts-related experience, including the past nine in McMorrow County, Ohio, where he most recently served as court administrator/chief probation officer.

He was hired after a nationwide search and interview process conducted by the county's circuit court judges.