Vivian Paige points me to this article from the Virginian-Pilot:
NORFOLK – In George Schaefer’s courthouse, paper equals money.
By converting marriage license forms to a computerized document the happy couple fills out themselves, Schaefer, the circuit court clerk, estimates he saved about 60 work hours per month – which adds up to $12,000 a year.
His paper-free ambitions expand to a much grander scale. Schaefer estimates he could save $2 million on the cost of building a new courthouse if he gets rid of the volumes of paper warehoused in the circuit court.
He’s on his way to doing it.
Clerks began scanning all new civil filings the first of the month. Marriage license forms went digital on the day before Valentine’s Day.
Schaefer and his staff already have converted most of the land records stored at the courthouse to digital images. Marriage licenses and judg ments have been scanned into computers.
The effort included removing sensitive information such as S ocial S ecurity numbers and mothers’ maiden names from documents to prevent identity theft.
Schaefer is part of the state’s electronic filing study group, which aims to eliminate paper from all transactions at the courthouse. Lawyers would file lawsuits via e-mail, and j udges would sign orders using a digital pen on a laptop computer. “The driving force is we need to find a way to be more efficient with space,” Schaefer said.
More efficient with space, and more efficient with time.
My experience with electronic filing of legal documents is pretty wide ranging. Back in the day when I spent a lot more time in Bankruptcy Court, I came to learn that a truly efficient electronic filing system was a godsend. Not only for the attorneys doing the filing, but also for the clients, the clerks, and the judges.
In today’s era of PDF files, JPG images, and the like, the idea that so much of the document-heavy side of litigation practice still ends up being printed out on paper and filed in a clerk’s office, with additional copies of that same document being mailed to opposing counsel, is, quite, simply, absurd.
It’s a waste of attorney time, staff time, and client’s money.
And yet, in the midst of the digital era, attorneys, like everyone else, are still wedded to paper.
The exceptions exist, but they are minimal. Federal Courts on almost all levels are at the point where they will be entirely paperless, except in exigent cirucmstances, within one or two years. But it’s the state courts where most of the real work is done, and, with few exceptions that I’m aware of , electronic filing is little more than a pilot project. The most? notable of those being the one undertaken by Jack Kennedy in Wise County, Virginia……and, based on the Circuit Court’s current web site, I’m not sure of the current state of the project.
Way back when this started, even before the Federal Courts in Virginia had signed on for electronic filing, I was involved in a commitee of the Fairfax Bar Association that eventually resulted in a short-lived pilot electronic filing project in Fairfax County Circuit Court. That project died when the third-party funding dried up.
And this is where the I-just-don’t-get-it part of me kicks in.
From everything I’ve read and from my own experience streching back more than five years now, it is clear that electronic filing of court documents makes an immense amount of sense.
Yes, there is an initial investment of equipment and time that is not insubtantial, but the savings in the long term, both for the Court and for attorneys (and, in turn, their clients) seem so readily apparent that the reluctence of various court systems to make more substantial moves toward electronic filings is, quite honestly, puzzling.
