The move to "e-filing" and "e-service" is part of the largest transition in the history of the state court system, said Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Lori Gildea. Starting this week in Stearns and Benton counties, attorneys can file all documents — in criminal and civil cases — electronically.
The only parties that won't eventually be required to do that are people representing themselves without an attorney. The change away from paper is a realization that so much of people's everyday business is done electronically, Gildea said.
"We wanted to be more responsive to our customers," she said. "We understand that the people we serve do their banking online, they do their doctoring online, they do their shopping online and they need to be able to interact with their court system in an online way as well."
The Minnesota Judicial Branch’s eCourtMN initiative is hoping to make the state court system more accessible, more efficient and more convenient for its users. The initiative means that paper, and the large volume of manila court files stored in courthouses will become a thing of the past.
Gone will be the days when judges and lawyers head to court carrying stacks of those files. Those files eventually will be replaced with laptops.
Electronic filing and service eliminates the need for attorneys and court users to travel to the courthouse or pay postage or courier costs to file documents. It's a dramatic change in an institution that, in the past, has been criticized for being slow to adapt to changing technologies and habits of its users.
"Some of us, and I put myself in this category, have been afraid of the technology," Gildea said.
She admitted being apprehensive at first when she first took the bench and looked up case documents on a computer screen rather than flipping through a paper file. She does all of her work on computers now, she said.
"You just have to rip the Band-Aid off and jump in," she said.
Morrison County has been part of the e-filing pilot project since July 2012, said Morrison County District Court Judge Conrad Freeberg. E-filing became mandatory in Morrison County this summer.
"I won't say that it's gone absolutely smoothly, because there have been some bumps in the road, but people are certainly adapting to the e-filing and I think appreciating it," Freeberg said. "It's been a real change for us as judges, but overall I think it's gone well."
Some of those bumps included getting people accustomed to a new way of filing documents. There is training offered to help attorneys learn the process.
The eCourtMN initiative will allow attorneys to file and serve documents through an online portal from work or home and eventually will allow members of the public to access court records remotely. Several counties already are filing criminal complaints electronically.
That change away from paper will also change what court administration employees do. Rather than being at a counter receiving files from law enforcement, attorneys and court staff, they are shifting more to making sure the documents received electronically are correct and private information is protected.
"A lot of that data input that we take time doing does go away, yet the functions of staff changes differently because now those documents come in and they're much more publicly accessible," said Stearns County court administrator George Lock. "There's much more of a focus in making sure those documents are accurate, they're correct and that confidentiality issues are addressed by the staff."
The court system will conduct a staffing study to determine what staffing levels are appropriate after the eCourtMN changes are in place, Gildea said.
Lock said the changes aren't necessarily creating less work for his employees, and he's had to absorb open positions not being filled because of budget shortfalls.
"These technologies that are coming in are being leveraged to help us keep up with our increased workload," Lock said.
Electronic filing and service was available in 57 district courts b?y mid-November, and the judicial branch wants to expand that to all 87 district courts by the middle of December.
The servers that store the courts' data are in the Twin Cities metro area, but the data are also "replicated out to other data centers across the state" as well as to a "non-court ," according to Beau Berentson, director of communications and public affairs for the judicial branch's court information office. All of these servers are in secure facilities that can only be accessed by designated court employees, he said.
That adds another layer of security for court data, which is vulnerable to damage or loss from a broken water pipe, fire or other natural disaster.
The judicial branch between fiscal years 2012 and 2015 spent $18.3 million on staff and infrastructure to implement its initiatives, Berenston said.
Another part of the eCourtMN transition is that law enforcement will have to file citations electronically by July 2016, said eCourtMN Portfolio Manager Shay Cleary. The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is assisting law enforcement agencies in that transition, he said.
The court system has provided public wireless Internet access in every courthouse in the state to allow users to do more of their work at court facilities.
The eCourtMN initiative received a 2014 State Government Innovation Award from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
©2015 the St. Cloud Times (St. Cloud, Minn.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
