Courts plan new electronic filing system

$20 million in stimulus money to finance project

FAYETTEVILLE — The Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts is being given $20 million to build a court management system to replace the current patchwork of antiquated systems.

“As Arkansas courts grow and change, this new system can grow and change to better serve the people of Arkansas,” said Marty Sullivan, Arkansas State Court administrator.

The money is coming from federal American Rescue Plan stimulus money the state received.

Users say the state’s current system for looking up and viewing court documents at no cost, CourtConnect, is clunky, slow, inconsistent, incomplete, unreliable, inaccurate, non-universal and frequently down.

“All I know is that the current system is antiquated and is not a good system,” said Kyle Sylvester, Washington County Circuit Clerk and president of the Arkansas Circuit Clerks Association. “Anything that is more user-friendly, has more detail-oriented reporting and easier to navigate would be a welcome sight.”

The current system also made it difficult at times for some county clerks to comply with the state Freedom of Information Act, he said.

State law says Social Security numbers, driver’s licence numbers, dates of birth, account numbers, anything that could be possibly used in identity theft, has to be redacted as well as the names of juveniles. The act also requires public records be made available immediately if not in use or storage.

Washington County is the only county that has redaction software approved by the state. When documents are filed, they go into a redaction

queue. Optical character recognition in the software highlights information for redaction, and it’s verified by a person, Sylvester said. If it needs to be redacted, they click on it.

“The only hiccup to that is once we get through redacting a document and hit submit, it goes to the state for verification, and they don’t have enough people to sit there and work that side of the program,” Sylvester said. “Sometimes it sits there for two months before it’s released into the file.”

The case management vendor, Avenu Insights, has been unable to provide Arkansas courts with a viable modernization path, according to Sullivan. The Administrative Office determined the only course for Arkansas courts is to build a court management system.

“Our expectation is that it will have a profound impact on the efficiency of the courts and result in increased public safety through better enforcement of court orders,” Sullivan said.

The Administrative Office of the Courts began its automation program in 2001 with highway safety funds. The money allowed them to deploy what was at the time a modern court solution, according to Sullivan. Electronic filing and online access to case management information is an integral part of providing access to the justice system for attorneys and the public, he said.

The technologies underlying the current CourtConnect systems have reached their limit, he said.

Simple services such as text reminders of court dates and payment due dates are not practical through the current systems, he said.

The new system will be able to leverage modern tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help streamline court processes and simplify participant interactions with the courts, Sullivan said.

“Well, hopefully it will do everything this one doesn’t,” said Ben Catterlin, a local attorney.

DESIGNING THE FUTURE

The Administrat ive Office of the Courts has worked over the last year to develop plans that would be ready to execute when money became available, according Sullivan.

The Arkansas Supreme Court requested funding for the project a year ago.

Anyone trying to use CourtConnect can see it’s an old system, said Timothy Holthoff, director of court information systems for the state.

“It’s not really easy to navigate, the information isn’t clear and easy to use. So I think one of the shortterm goals is going to be to replace CourtConnect,” Holthoff said. “The public CourtConnect version right now is on basically a de-supported infrastructure.”

Amanda Kennedy, an attorney in Little Rock, has been frustrated with how the system looks and operates.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Kennedy said of the money to replace it. “I hope it will be more user friendly and look more modern.”

One reason the current system is really problematic, Holtoff said, is Oracle has been trying to get rid of the technology it was built on for more than 10 years.

“The other issue is because of the way it was designed. It’s really hard to navigate, and the learning curve for new users is so steep,” he said. “If you don’t hit the right buttons in the right order at the right time, you make mistakes, and then it’s up to us to fix it. We have a staff of 20 folks that are dedicated to supporting the system because it’s so hard to use and mistakes are so common.”

OPEN RECORDS

Circuit clerks around the state are required to use CourtConnect to be on the state’s court management system.

Local and state officials say there are no Freedom of Information Act issues created by problems with the current system because the records are still available for inspection at the circuit clerk’s office in each county.

Washington County went live with electronic filing in 2018, but not every county has gone completely electronic, Sylvester said. Sylvester said the Administrative Office of the Courts has assured him that he’s in compliance with the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.

“Our court records were online anyway prior to going to the state system and that satisfied the FOIA stipulations as far as being able to inspect or view said court documents because it was available online, but we also had the hard copies here if somebody wanted to come in and physically inspect the case files,” Sylvester said.

“Now that everything is electronic and there are no more paper files, we’re still compliant with having them available online. Those can be accessed via phone, the public library or your own computer, lap top or tablet at home.”

Getting new filings redacted and online can still be a problem, Sylvester said. His office gets about 3,000 new civil, criminal and domestic relations cases a year. Those are brand new cases and don’t include what is being filed daily in previously filed cases.

But, Sylvester said his clerks can print out a copy of any document that’s been filed, manually redact it and then rescan it if someone needs it immediately.

Washington County has not kept paper records since 2018, Sylvester said. Cases back to 2014 have been scanned into CourtConnect. Cases filed before May 1, 2008 are archived.

“We have those on a database if somebody needs a case file from 1997, then we go to our archives,” Sylvester said. “We’ve got a folder on our desktops, we can go in there and look a case up and we could email it, we could print it off. If somebody needed a copy of it. We can do that.”