Electronic Filing and the Courts
The issue of "electronic filing" is different in the courts in several
areas. The Courts are finding it necessary
to address electronic filing, and to find a medium on Information, security
and technology.
E-Filing is a revolutionary means of electronicialy distributing information
and documents. The current uses of distributing this information
can be by: Faxing, Telephone, Computer Modem, or most currently, there
has been a good deal of attention paid to internet access of the court
records and forms. With this new technology it now saves the courts time
and money over the handling of the millions plus court pleading filed each
year. The filing of paper pleadings with the court imposes significant
burdens on the court's personnel and facilities and they take up a tremendous
amount of space. E-filing of pleadings, briefs, and discovery items holds
the promise of fixing many of these problems of storage, but they bringing
new and harder problems of security, access and the high cost of this new
technology in their place. Online electronic access also extends to taxes,
court opions, and online court forms.
CourtWeb has
rulings online pertaining to participating judges who post copies of their
rulings in pending motions. The court also has a service, which will notify
you by e-mail whenever new rulings are added to the web site.
Perhaps the best use of electronic filing is United
States District Court for the Northern District of California, stating
that all pleadings in securities class actions be filed with the Securities
Class Action Clearinghouse maintained by the Stanford
University Law School. As a result of this new law, alot of the pleadings,
motions, petition and briefs filed in cases involving many high-tech companies
are now available online.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania uses
the MDL 1203 Web-based Docket
and Document Delivery System for the distribution of docket information,
and sponsored by VeriLaw. The
court's Pretrial Order 173, which makes filing at the site mandatory for
all cases that have 100 or more claimants, and provides that the internet
filing is supplementary to and does not substatute filing with the court
clerk.
In Michigan, electronic filing is provided by the Washtenaw
Circuit Court. The Washtenaw Court accepts legal documents by email
attachments in one of three formats, ASCII, Word 6.0, and WordPerfect.
As a help for people who need it, the court has a page with directions
on how to send this message, including a link to the address to which the
message is to be sent. This is not a subtution for filing with the clerk.
Additional Links:
Internet
Experiments in Electronic Court Filing
Electronic Court
Filing
Law Library Resource Exchange
Virtual Courthouse
Electronic Court Records
