Courts begin slowly with electronic filing

CEDAR RAPIDS - A long-awaited pilot program that will move Iowa courts into the paperless future starts Monday in Plymouth County, and could start in the 6th Judicial District in 2012.

The Electronic Document Management System will eventually allow all court documents to be filed electronically and available online to judges, attorneys, prosecutors, court employees and the public. This will help efficiency and reduce paper costs and storage.

Plymouth County was chosen as the pilot program by the Judicial Technology Committee based on size of county, total case filings, support of courthouse staff and potential effect of additional workload on court staff, Steve Davis, Iowa judicial branch spokesman, said.

Story County will be the next to install the system after Plymouth is up and running.

The judicial branch is currently reviewing how to implement the five year $19 million project in the other 97 counties, Davis said.

Carroll Edmondson, 6th Judicial District court administrator, said this system has been in the works for about 10 years. In 2001, there was money in the judicial technology fund but it was scooped up by the state for that year's financial crisis and implementation of the system remained on hold until now.

Sharon Modracek, 6th Judicial clerk of court, said she's excited about how it will improve efficiency in the courts.

“Right now, there's one court file and if a judge has it, then an attorney or a clerk can't see it. This system will allow everybody to review the files any time they need to.”

Modracek also pointed out that if this system had been around in 2008 it could have saved the courts some of the millions spent for restoration of the court files that were damaged in the flood.

Those 134,127 court files were restored through a freeze drying process for about $5 million, Edmondson said. Edmondson said if the district had the system back then, not all would have been entered but the ones that were would have saved some money.

There's not enough staff or time to go back and enter all the previously filed documents, Charlene Peterson, Plymouth County clerk of court, said. They will have to start from day one of implementation.

She would like all the paperwork on pending cases to be scanned in but that would take a lot of time and she doesn't know the criteria yet for what existing documents will be entered.

Peterson said the equipment will be set up and training will happen Monday through Wednesday. Once everything is installed, there will be public access terminals to file electronically and attorneys will be able to file from their offices.

Peterson said electronic filing will be mandatory but people can request a waiver from the court to not file electronically. Initially, the mandatory rule won't be strictly enforced and clerks will walk people through the process, she said.

The electronic documents won't be available online to the public right away, Peterson said. If someone comes to Plymouth and uses the public terminals, they will be able to view the filed documents in a case, but if someone is not using the public terminals or not connected to the case, they won't be able to see them through Iowa Courts Online. Peterson said she didn't know when the linking of the system and courts online would take place.