TOPEKA—Shawnee County Administrative Judge Terry L. Bullock announced today the completion of a six-month pilot project of testing electronic filing of civil cases, the first of its kind in Kansas.
The new technology was unveiled at a demonstration for the news media and state and county officials Wednesday morning at the Shawnee County courthouse. Supreme Court Justice Robert E. Davis, who was on hand for Wednesday's presentation, said this is the first project like this in Kansas.
Davis is the technology adviser to the Supreme Court and serves as chairman of the Appellate Court Technology Committee. "We at the court are excited about this project and look to the day when much of the state's judicial paper trail can be reduced to further expedite court business and proceedings," Justice Davis said.
Judge Bullock said, "We already are accepting electronic case filings for approximately 85 percent of our civil caseload." Based upon this pilot project, Shawnee County's courts plan to move forward with having additional departments on-line by the end of the year. He said the project has been "overwhelmingly successful, thanks to the cooperation of many groups of people, ranging from the legislature and Supreme Court, which provided seed money, to local attorneys and their clients, as well as court staff.
"During this program, we have had thousands of civil cases filed electronically at a fraction of the time it would have taken to process them manually," he said. "Next, we plan to make it available for all attorneys and taxpayers, who wish to file suit acting as their own attorney."
The court first began accepting filings of debt collection cases in July. These cases account for approximately 85 percent of all civil cases being processed in the Shawnee County District Court.
During Wednesday's demonstration, 100 cases were filed and docketed instantly. As a test, a deputy clerk of the district court processed an equal number last week. The manual filings took a full day to process.
"The savings to taxpayers is immense when you consider that each of these 22,000 cases, if filed individually, would require a minimum of five to 15 minutes each to process by a court clerk, if they also answer telephone calls and have other interruptions. Now, they can be processed as a batch by a couple of keystrokes in nano-seconds, not hours or days," he said.
The judge said today's announcement has been made possible only through the cooperation and help of a number of persons and groups. He said the local court received a legislative grant from the court technology fund, which is administered by the state Supreme Court. Among the attorneys donating much time and resources to make the test project successful are Walt Scott, Tom Valentine, Kent Hollins, Lou Probasco, Todd Butler and Scott McGlasson. "We also are grateful to these lawyers' clients, who automated their own account systems to conform with the new court plan," the judge remarked.
"I also would be remiss if I didn't thank our technical staff plus all those in the office of the clerk of district court who performed above and beyond the call of duty to make this program a reality. During the past year, they have done double duty by processing all the cases by hand under the old system, while at the same time, planning and putting the new one in place."
The new streamlined process will move one step further by spring when filings of more kinds of cases will be accepted from attorneys. Also, the computers in the sheriff's service of process department soon will be connected so that at the time a case is processed in the clerk's office, the same data will be sent simultaneously to the sheriff where the only hard copy of a document is prepared by a computer for service on defendants by law enforcement officers.
"The only paperwork prepared will be the petition and summons that will be delivered to the defendant to formally notify him or her of the lawsuit. All other case information will be maintained on a computer with no paper being filed unless the matter is contested and it results in a full blown trial on the merits.