MANSFIELD — Bambi Couch Page rose to the Richland County Prosecutor’s seat in September 2014 when James Mayer died.

“The office hasn’t skipped a beat,” Couch Page said. “We have continued to provide high-quality representation both in criminal and in the civil aspects of the job.”

She is now seeking to retain her seat and start a regular four-year term to continue on what she posits as growth and a move forward in the use of technology within the office.

“We’re bringing in a more modern view of how the office should be run,” she said, adding a huge part of that is the transition from an office with paper files to electronic files.

“As an example, when Johnson’s Brothers caught fire, if that had swept through our office, we were 100 percent paper — we would have lost everything,” Couch Page said.

The office has worked to make the transition to electronic filing since Couch Page took over.

Couch Page also said the office’s criminal trial conviction rates have increased since she took over in 2014.

According to prosecutor’s office records, in 2014 the conviction rate was 77 percent with 23 total cases. In 2015, the rate jumped to 84 percent with 38 total cases. To date in 2016, the prosecutor’s office has taken 26 cases to court and has achieved an 87 percent conviction rate.

Since Couch Page’s governance, there have been 103 domestic violence cases considered for charges. There have been 70 cases where the defendant pleaded to a felony charge and 46 of them went to prison.

Couch Page believes her experience in practicing law qualifies her for the job.

She graduated from The Ohio State University in 1979 with a degree in social science education. She graduated from Ohio Northern University with a law degree in 1982 and passed the bar exam the same year.

From there she went to work for a law firm in Shelby where she gained experience in domestic relations, probate court and appellate court.

The majority of her experience in practicing law comes from Richland County, with brief stints in Crawford County and Morrow County.

She has tried both civil and criminal cases — she even did magistrate work earlier in her career in Morrow County, giving her what she described as a well-rounded law background. But her favorite discipline remains criminal law.

“When I was in law school I loved criminal law. That was my favorite part of law school. Ironically enough, while I was in law school, and for a brief period after I graduated, I did do criminal defense. It gave me the understanding of that side of a case, but I always wanted to do anything involving criminal law,” she said, adding that her passion developed as a prosecutor.

Couch Page expanded a victims grant to allow for a additional advocate work with victims. Within the last year, the expansion of the grant allowed the office to hire a full time secretarial position to help organize ongoing work with victims. It also allowed the office to offer a teen dating, teen violence awareness project.

“We want to expand that out to other schools to get the word out about relationships and hopefully assist in avoiding a lot of our ongoing domestic violence issues,” Couch Page said.