The complete technology programme for a new courthouse: enterprise network and building-wide fibre, two data centres built out with power, raised floor and cooling, courtroom technology, VoIP, security camera and physical security systems, building-wide wireless, and a distributed antenna system.
The security architecture federated six independently governed justice agencies inside one shared facility — the City, the Clerk of Courts, the Sheriff’s Office, the Public Defender, the State Attorney and the state criminal justice network — each in its own security zone, with inter-agency access defined explicitly and bilaterally rather than assumed. Every pair of zones was a deliberate decision about what may cross and in which direction.
Resilience was built into the building rather than around it: diverse A and B fibre paths to each of forty-two distribution closets across seven floors, a core dual-homed over separate routes to two independent city core sites, and survivable local call processing so the building kept dial tone if the path to the central voice platform failed. Courtroom video conferencing was carried through the security boundary as a designed service, not an exception.
The cutover was a live relocation of a working court system to a fixed date, engineered with temporary parallel data paths so existing operations kept running through the move, a five-phase test plan and a documented back-out plan. The network design document ran to 262 pages, at revision 16 by the time it was executed.
Outcome
A working court system relocated to a fixed date with operations running throughout, on infrastructure designed to outlast the building's first refresh cycle.