Starting in January recreational marijuana will be legal in Illinois.

Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx is partnering up with a non-profit to automatically clear marijuana-related convictions.

Code for America already helped clear the convictions of more than 8,000 in California and officials in Illinois are hoping to see the same success rate.

Cook County is the first county outside of California to bring in Code for America's technology.

And there are currently two important issues being worked on.

• How people will get notified of vacated/expunged records: a safe, private notification is being thought out if the address of the person is outdated.
• Since all expungements have to get approved by the court Foxx is trying to have a court call in bulk so there's no backlogging.

By looking at the racial breakdown of this process those who are getting relief are mostly communities of color.