County eyes new appeals filing

The two offices in the Chester County Justice Center that handle court filings will begin a new system of handling case appeals to the state Superior Court designed to make the process more efficient for attorneys and more cost effective for taxpayers, the two office holders said recently.

The county’s Clerk of Courts and Prothonotary’s offices will utilize an electronic filing system to get cases moved from their offices to the appeals court, something few counties in the state are doing on an integrated basis, Clerk of Courts Yolanda Van De Krol and Prothonotary Matt Holliday said in a recent interview.

In the past, the two offices wold have to take the original cases pleadings — in the clerk’s office, criminal cases, and in the prothonotary’s civil filings — box them up and send them via the U.S. Postal Service when a litigant decided to appeal a conviction or a judgement.

Now, all files will be scanned and sent to the appeals court via e-filing, Van De Krol and Holliday said.

“It’s pricey and we want eventually to get rid of paper in the

whole process,” said Holliday, who has served as prothonotary for the past three years.

“And the really neat thing is that we didn’t spend a dollar of taxpayer money to complete the new system,” echoed Van De Krol, who took office at the beginning of 2018. The pair said their chief deputies, Alexis Barsamian in the clerks office and Tracy Christman in the prothonotaries office — were able to explore ways of working with the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts to sole their common issues.

Holliday’s office has been using e-filings already, giving litigants the ability to file a lawsuit, brief, or response via the internet, rather than having someone troop across the borough — or more expensively from Philadelphia, Harrisburg, or other locations, — to get their paperwork officially recorded.

Now they can do so at the press of a “send” button. Van De Krol’s office has been planning to start using an efiling system in the coming months.

But the offices had still used the old “snail-mail” system to get appeals to the state Superior Court, meaning postage costs from their budget. The pair estimated

that between the two the new e-filing system for appeals would save $20,000.

In addition, as Holliday pointed out, transferring cases to the appellate branch will permit the court offices here to retain their original copies of the case filings, meaning fewer mistakes could be made or time wasted in filings.

Van De Krol and Holliday said that as far as they know, only a quarter of the counties in the state are using the AOPC’s e-filing system, and in many of those counties only one side of the court aisle, criminal or civil, is taking advantage of it.

Attorneys are expected to appreciate the new system because it allows them to bypass courthouse office hours, and gives them the ability to track progress of their appeals on line. Each side can see the flings that the other has filed immediately, on their office or home computers.

The two office holders say the new system is a way for them to think of cost saving efficiencies that had been overlooked in the past. Plus Van Der Krol said, it is a “nice bi-partisan effort.” She is a Democrat and Holliday a Republican.

“We worked well together as soon as we found we had common issues,” she said.