About Us

Journal Technologies Inc. is an enterprise software company connected as a long-time subsidiary with Daily Journal Corporation (NASDAQ: DJCO), a company with a fascinating history—including the legendary Charlie Munger as our long-time Chairman. Though he delegated this role in 2022, he remained an active member of the Board until he passed away in November 2023.

Headquartered in downtown Los Angeles (on the edge of Little Tokyo and the Arts District), Journal Technologies has approximately two hundred and twenty employees. We have a major office in Logan, Utah, teams in Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, Canada, and a growing number of permanent remote staff across North America and the world.

We’re incredibly excited about the possibilities around the work we do. Though our roots as a business date back to 1888 (as a newspaper, and Daily Journal Corporation is still in the legal publishing business), our focus is squarely on the future.

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Our Approach

Successful civilizations have fairness at their core; a set of rules that everyone needs to abide in the pursuit of harmony. Known as the Rule of Law, our social compact is based on the idea that every one of us is accountable to the law and making things right.

At Journal Technologies, we make technology that helps society better deliver on these important concepts through software for courts and the justice system. As we help governments and their employees deliver continued foundational court processes, our R&D is also focused to leverage new possibilities with technology to improve access and efficiency.
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In the background, we understand that returns to our shareholders flow from creating great products that delight customers, and that truly great products are built and implemented by great people. Under a new generation of leadership, a core goal is to become an extraordinary place to invest one’s energy and build a rewarding career.

Our Core Values

What makes us tick? There are three core values that guide our conduct and decisions:

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The Golden Rule

We treat one other and those with whom we do business as we’d want to be treated. For example, we never ask someone to sign something we wouldn’t sign ourselves (and we expect the same in return).

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Help Build a Fairer Society

We seek to maximize the potential of our work to reinforce the potential of the courts and justice system to ensure a fair and just society, and that the legacy of our careers be positive in the world.

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Continuous Improvement

We challenge ourselves and take action to ensure ongoing improvement as individuals, teams, and as a company.


Our Technology Beliefs

What sculpts our technology? In our mission to build the best possible software technology for our current and future customers, we’ve also institutionalized a set of fifteen technology beliefs that will be at the heart of all engineering and business model decisions we make going forward.

1. Investing in flexible, repeatable software products yields a beautiful business model for everyone
When you amortize development costs of solutions that are adaptable to diverse requirements across many customers, everyone benefits. Customers get vastly better value for their dollar, reduced risk, and benefit from ongoing co-investment and product evolution over time. As a company, a software model simultaneously provides the opportunity to earn compelling profits that will delight our shareholders and secure the livelihoods of our employees on a long-term basis.
2. Being a bona fide software company requires much more than creating a software product
Someone can build (or buy) a Boeing 787, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got themselves an airline. Creating a true software company is about building an organization that ensures our products generate enduring value for customers, and that we design and execute well on the ancillary services (updates/R&D, QA/QC, support, training, partnerships, professional services, bi-directional communication, and ongoing development of our staff) that are required to ensure they succeed with our technology.
3. Success is measured over years, not just at an initial go live
We understand that our job is a process and not an event; it’s all about enduring success with deployments. Everyone loves basking in the appreciation that flows from a successful roll-out, but the true value of a great enterprise implementation and vendor relationship is revealed over years (and sometimes decades). No system is an island, and successful products evolve alongside external technology forces, where both incremental and disruptive external technology changes over time consistently create opportunities to enrich customer deployments, rather than embodying major obstacles that interrupt productivity with rewrites and redeployments.
4. Worthwhile technologies eliminate old inefficiencies
Virtually all worthwhile new technologies capitalize on eliminating old inefficiencies, rather than capitalizing on the inefficiencies themselves. Based heavily on Michael Hammer’s timeless concepts in Re-engineering the Corporation, we strive to rethink fundamental processes to create better, more efficient ways of doing things. We counsel not to get hung up on old workflows; it’s about outcomes. We also strive to ruthlessly cannibalize configuration and management activities in our software that might’ve traditionally represented billable project hours.
5. Ensure a balanced portfolio of product investment… even if that doesn’t create buzz
Our responsibility is to focus on the right things. Our job is to meet current requirements and wants of customers and their end users, but also invest in R&D to ensure ongoing relevance in the face of inevitable technology change. We seek to do product development that will delight customers and their end users over the short term (1-4 months), medium-term (4-36 months), and long-term (3-15 years). And it’s not just cool features and preparing for technology change coming down the road. We diligently allocate resources towards more mundane investment that we understand yields great products in ways that don’t score many points on RFPs; user experience/interface refinement, bug fixes, performance optimization, and investments in cybersecurity and privacy assurance. The potential threat of cybersecurity threats in the current era are difficult to overestimate and must be factored into all product and project decision-making.
6. A product approach based on configuration beats custom development
Like custom tailored clothes, custom software sounds good. Except a custom suit doesn’t require regular cybersecurity updates, and new features don’t get added over time. We believe custom development should be a last resort, not a first instinct. We aim to deliver the flexibility customers need via configuration patterns that are unaffected by new releases. Otherwise, customers find themselves on an endless, disruptive and costly model updating and testing custom code with every update.
7. Necessary flexibility is essential
Clothes that almost fit are not good, and software is similar. While one-size-fits-all software systems work for many applications, they aren’t ideal when there are subtle but important differences between important customer workflows that can’t be accommodated (or without taking the path of custom code).
8. We must balance the interests of system producers and their end consumers
In focusing our engineering, we believe we have dual responsibilities. First, is to ensure we make ongoing success as straightforward as possible for our government customers who serve as producers of the technology systems for their end-users. Second, we must ensure their end-users as consumers of the system have a successful and positive experience. Sometimes, in terms of approaches and design, there can exist tensions between the best interests of these producers and consumers (what is most efficient for one can introduce hardship for the other); our goal is to effectively manage these tensions.
9. Make things as simple as possible (and no simpler)
Beyond user experience (UX), we believe a focus on customer experience (CX) is at the heart of wonderful products and great software businesses. As part of our vision for the future, we’re developing a relentless focus on creating simple, intuitive products that reflect a deep understanding what our end users need to accomplish, and without focusing so much on making things beautiful that we inadvertently compromise usability.
10. Listen to customers, and a customer isn’t always right
In addition to building and delivering great technology, clients count on us to leverage our domain expertise and serve as candid, trusted advisors. While customers are almost always right in terms of outcomes they require, they’re not necessarily experts in software design and workflow engineering. If an approach to a requirement/customer request is suboptimal or will entail unintended future downsides that we believe outweigh the short-term benefits, we view it as our professional responsibility to respectfully challenge and collaborate to reach a more ideal approach.  People are not infallible. Power does not confer rightness. In fact, we have a no-jerk policy. These principles absolutely apply to us too; we strive to listen and approach every conversation with humility.
11. With software lifecycles, appreciate the realities of real world deployment
Eventually, it can be appropriate and necessary to deprecate product versions or patterns that have reached unavoidable obsolescence. We understand that customers who deploy production enterprise systems delivering vital operations must be able to rely on us as a vendor to ensure they can conduct business and assimilate change, at the speed they operate (within reason of course). It’s painful to admit, but on one occasion in our company history we believe we deprecated a product far too quickly. This negatively impacted certain customers and that experience deeply affected us too. The new generation of Journal Technologies leadership—indeed it is imbued in our collective corporate DNA—is committed to erring on the side of providing overly generous transition times with concurrent legacy support.
12. When considering new technology, timing is everything
With production enterprise systems, it is possible to introduce risk and dysfunction by moving too slowly (think cybersecurity for everyone, or to ensure market competitiveness in the private sector). It is also dangerous to jump on the bandwagon of new technology trends or offerings before there is sufficient technology emergence and business model/leader traction. Except in special situations, a likely long-term pattern ought be identifiable; all else is gambling. Regardless of their preference to be innovators, early adopters, early majority, or laggards… our customers need to be able to rely on us to time things well; to neither unnecessarily rush, nor hesitate when an informed path forward is evident.
13. Leverage third-party offerings intelligently
It is generally ill-advised to reinvent the wheel. When choosing third-party enabling technologies (e.g. frameworks, models, libraries) as we engineer our core technology, we seek to factor in both technology and non-technology factors to ensure our vendor choices are optimal and stand the test of time (specifically, hindsight).
14. Vendor optionality is good for customers
We recognize many clients work with multiple industry vendors; we commit to engineering decisions choices that enable rather than impede diverse vendor ecosystems. Vendor lock-in isn’t good for customers, and we have a responsibility to facilitate mobility and mixed environments. Creating solutions that offer network effects is good.
15. We only invoice once for development hours
We don’t recycle and rebill. Any project development we do for a specific client, we make available across our client base from that point forward at no incremental cost, provided it’s feasible. Ideally, and if of interest to numerous customers on an ongoing basis, we seek to integrate that work into our core products if this can be done efficiently and without creating product bloat.