electronic Filing & Service for Courts

Illinois: Electronic filing puts St. Clair County in vanguard

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 14, 2005

Mountains of paperwork in the St. Clair County courts have been swept away.

The system has switched gradually over the past two years to electronic record keeping for all traffic and misdemeanor cases.

Chief Circuit Judge Jan V. Fiss said St. Clair was the first county in Illinois to make the switch under a pilot project approved by the Illinois Supreme Court.

Included as well are all ordinance violations, drunken driving cases and conservation cases such as hunting and fishing violations.

Electronic imaging is also used for felony cases, but it is not yet the official record for that division. Nor has it spread to civil cases.

Fiss said the change had already helped everyone from circuit judges down to police officers on the street. But the biggest fans seem to be the court clerks.

No longer do they spend hours each day searching for documents, filing documents and refiling documents. In the past, courtrooms sometimes came to a standstill while a search was conducted.

Circuit clerk supervisor Debbie DeRousse said the biggest advantage of electronic imaging can be summed up in a single word -- access.

"It's at our fingertips," she said.

The sheer volume of cases in St. Clair County gives some idea how important that is.

Illinois: Cooke County discusses eFiling

From an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times, November 30, 2004

..But if the county adopts a plan put forth by Commissioner Forrest Claypool to utilize available commercial technology for the electronic recording, processing and transferring of documents -- which would enable it to cut back on cumbersome, paper-generating processes that eat up overtime costs and slow efficiency -- it will at least advance the idea of streamlining government rather than boosting taxes as a first option. Claypool, chairman of the board's Information Technology and Automation Committee, says if the county used E-Recording and other technologies in three offices alone -- the Cook County recorder of deeds, clerk of the circuit court and sheriff -- it would save $35 million annually.
Calling the county's approach to technology "incremental and haphazard," he says the savings or generated funds will be even greater if technology is applied more broadly to county government. Augmented by convenience fees for users of these services, the savings would, he projects, be in excess of the estimated shortfall.

Other county governments have greatly benefitted from full or partial use of electronic filings and digital scannings and such. Miami-Dade was able to reduce staff by 19.5 percent and cases the staff deals with by half. While it's easy to get lost in all the numbers and assume that what works for one jurisdiction would work for ours, there is no denying the need for county government to join the 21st century.