CANTON By early next year, attorneys will not have to run up the Stark County Courthouse steps at 4:25 p.m. to make a last-minute case filing.
And the era of storing county court records on paper will be over.
Stark County Common Pleas Judge Taryn Heath and Stark County Clerk of Courts Louis Giavasis presented an update Tuesday on the development of the county's electronic filing system.
Giavasis told Stark County commissioners that he and others overseeing the project hope to launch the system for civil general division court filings by Jan. 1. The system would go live if testing this year by selected local law firms goes well.
Over time, the system, which has been planned since 2013, would be expanded to include case filings for the criminal division, Stark County Family Court and Stark County Probate Court.
Giavasis estimated the total cost would be $2 million. Most of that is covered by a $50-per-case fee that the Stark County Common Pleas judges imposed in 2011 to help pay for implementing e-filing.
The county's general fund pays for the salaries and benefits of the clerk of courts' programmers. Giavasis did not have figures for how much it would cost to maintain the system. He said system designers are still working with a vendor so payment of filing fees could be done online with a credit card when attorneys and litigants representing themselves file lawsuits electronically. He said the databases and case management systems of all divisions of the county's Common Pleas Court have been consolidated into one.
Heath said she first advocated for the implementation of e-filing after she saw a demonstration of Montgomery County's system at an Ohio judges' association conference around 2011.
"I got very excited. I was like we have got to have this in Stark County," she told the commissioners, adding that she later pitched the concept to the county's other Common Pleas judges. "Everybody seemed interested. We developed a plan."
Four years
After the Stark County Common Pleas Court issued a request for proposal from vendors in 2013, the county reached an agreement in March 2015 with Tybera Development Group, based in Orem, Utah, to design the software interface for an e-filing system that it called eFlex. The cost to the county would be $920,060 for implementation with $18,800 a year for maintenance and $5,000 a year for monitoring.
The court worked on developing the system with Tybera for more than four years.
While planning the new e-filing system, court officials decided they had to scrap their old case management system, written with an obsolete programming language, and replace it with a new one that was compatible with Tybera's system. So the case management system could be more customizable, court officials decided to hire in-house their own programmers rather than buy an off-the-shelf software package.
One significant setback was when four of Giavasis' clerk programmers quit, apparently for higher jobs. Giavasis said he got the commissioners to approve increased funding so he could boost the salary of the position to $65,000 from $50,000. He hired two new clerk programmers in April.
"We even have one Common Pleas judge lovingly nickname this project 'Vietnam,'" said Giavasis. "Because it seems like it would never end. But we are to the light at the end of the tunnel I believe."
"I stressed along the way that we need to do this right, not fast," Heath said. "And after a long and arduous process we have perfected a case management system that will support an e-filing system on top of it. ... This is going to change the way we do business. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be efficient. The one really cool thing that I think just the members of the general public and outside users will experience will be the automatic filing, docketing and imaging of every filing. So within seconds or minutes of something being filed with the court. It will be available. That's pretty revolutionary."
Heath said that while many other counties have e-filing where attorneys can submit documents electronically, Stark County will have a system where the documents will be automatically shared with the judges overseeing the cases, their magistrates and bailiffs and attorneys for the parties.
Demo
Mark Chastain, the Stark County Common Pleas Court director of information technology, and Jodi German, the assistant chief deputy clerk of courts, gave a demonstration. They showed how an attorney could file a complaint. Chastain showed how judges and magistrates could manage the case electronically by selecting deadlines for the steps in the lawsuit and how the system generated template forms for court officials and attorneys to fill out. The system can even place a judge's electronic signature on a document once they approved it.
Giavasis said an attorney could file a complaint or motion with a smartphone from the beach.
"What would take hours upon hours to complete was done in a matter of minutes," he said, adding that over time, his office would need fewer clerical employees but more IT employees to maintain and upgrade the new system.
Heath said currently, when a case is filed, papers have to be shuffled from one officials' desk or department to another, adding to the time the court takes to process the filing of a case document.
Giavasis said, "the system we have is different than anything anybody else has anywhere in the state of Ohio. My brother Phil (Giavasis, the Canton Municipal Clerk of Court) accepts files. But it's no different than an attorney walking in and laying it on his desk. You still have to do all that (processing) manually. This is fully integrated not only in my office but with the courts. So everything now is moving at back and forth electronically at the speed of light."
Giavasis estimated that court files on paper take up 80 to 90 percent of the county's storage space. Except for paper documents serving defendants in cases, he said the entire case file would be stored electronically in multiple locations including backups.
He added that the system is fully integrated with the county's CJIS or Criminal Justice Information System website, which allows people to view court records and case dockets from multiple courts in the county.
Giavasis and Heath said the county's three municipal courts, with the Canton Municipal Court having its own electronic case management system, and the 5th District of Appeals have chosen for now not to integrate their systems with the county.
"That's going to free up a lot of space in the county for storage," Giavasis said. "So time savings, storage. The whole nine yards. ... The cost savings and time savings to the taxpayers of Stark County is going to be exponential over time.
Reach Repository writer Robert Wang at (330) 580-8327 or robert.wang@cantonrep.com.
On Twitter: @rwangREP
