In a four-page letter to the N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts, Guilford Clerk of Superior Court Lisa Johnson-Tonkins laid out a series of “grave concerns” about the April 29 launch of a new electronic courts system in her county. The suite of eCourts tools — including a case management system the state now calls “Enterprise Justice” — has been on a phased rollout to groups of counties for the last year.
“Since the announcement of the go-live date of Enterprise Justice in Guilford County, everything has felt extremely rushed, and I personally feel that we are not getting all the information and training needed to be successful for the date Guilford County goes live,” Johnson-Tonkins wrote in the letter dated Jan. 31.
In his response to Johnson-Tonkins two days after her letter, AOC Director Ryan Boyce acknowledged “that preparing for implementation requires a large amount of work, for both your staff and NCAOC.”
AOC is offering temporary resources and overtime pay prior to the April 29 go-live date, and the agency will have onsite staff in the county for several weeks after the launch, Boyce said.
Reached Wednesday, Johnson-Tonkins said Boyce’s response failed to address all of her concerns.
“Basically, it’s: the show must go on,” she said.
In her letter, she said issues with training, heavy workloads, complications with the county’s unique two-courthouse system and the “inconsistency” of the software were among the reasons she wanted to push back the expansion of the system to Guilford.
Since launching in a handful of courthouses a year ago, eCourts is now used daily in 17 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, offering attorneys and the public online filing options and access to court documents. Ten more counties, including Guilford, Durham and Chatham, are slated for the next wave.
But the rollout has been plagued with problems.
Even months after launching in pilot counties, the new system continued to slow court operations — in some cases shutting down courtrooms altogether. Its functionality has drawn repeated complaints from attorneys, and a bipartisan mix of elected prosecutors have called for an independent review of the software’s implementation. And citing public safety concerns, the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles commissioner called for a pause of the rollout days before its expansion in Charlotte.
The company charging the state more than $100 million for eCourts, Tyler Technologies, also faces a potential class-action lawsuit filed by several plaintiffs who allege that problems with the rollout led to wrongful arrests and extended jail time. The next hearing in that case is scheduled for Feb. 27.
Guilford a unique court system
Johnson-Tonkins said she’s worried about the increased workload for clerks on her staff in Guilford County, the third-largest court system by volume. While keeping daily court operations running, they must complete hours of training on the system and clean up data — tasks she said keep multiplying as the county gets closer to launch.
In the weeks leading up to the rollout, clerks will need to scan up to 10,000 case files into the system for criminal court alone.
The state’s failure to consider the amount of work required raises “major alarms,” Johnson-Tonkins wrote in her letter to AOC.
“I’ve had people leave because it was just too much,” Johnson-Tonkins told The News & Observer Wednesday. “Clerks really carry the weight of the judicial system on their backs, and I don’t think that we get the credit or the recognition for all we do.”
Guilford also presents a unique problem for eCourts: It’s the only county in the state with separate courthouses, located in Greensboro and High Point. That means separate filing locations and separate venues that for the most part operate independently, she said.
“The system — the way they’re explaining it to us — isn’t built to adequately address that,” she said. “And that’s problematic.”
As it’s done with repeated requests from The N&O and The Charlotte Observer for interviews, AOC declined Wednesday to make anyone from the agency available to comment for this story.
But in an emailed statement, AOC spokesperson Graham Wilson said the agency is “committed to a successful implementation” in the county. Guilford and all other counties launching April 29 will receive training, conduct mock court and practice data entry with the new system, he said.
“NCAOC understands Guilford’s concerns posed by operating separate courthouses in Greensboro and High Point and has created a specific team that has been working with county judicial officials to address these concerns,” Wilson said.
But the launch date for Guilford, he added, remains unchanged.
System showing problems before launch
Johnson-Tonkins acknowledged that a new system for managing North Carolina courts — currently a decades-old amalgam of physical mainframes and paper case records — “is long overdue.”
But despite promises from state court leaders, the replacement has not made things more efficient, she said.
“It’s actually going in the opposite direction,” Johnson-Tonkins said in an interview. “We’re probably going to need more staff to operate a system that, in my mind, should make things easier.”
Even though the case management system hasn’t rolled out in Guilford yet, some eCourts elements that have launched statewide have proven unreliable. Electronic warrants software now used by all county courthouses, for example, goes down at least weekly, she said.
When the case management system does roll out in Greensboro and High Point in late April, Johnson-Tonkins said the public may not see major impacts. Criminal courts may slow down, while some services may speed up with electronic filing.
But behind the scenes, the increased workload may not be sustainable, she said. In the two weeks since she sent her letter, Johnson-Tonkins said her position on the problems facing the looming launch date haven’t changed.
“They told us we needed to prepare for a marathon — and we did prepare. We did everything we were supposed to,” Johnson-Tonkins said. “We’ve just been having to run that marathon every day.”
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