Mecklenburg County will move to online court records this year. But is it ready?

Mecklenburg County’s voluminous paper court records will go digital on Oct. 9, the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts announced Friday, amid reported problems in other counties and a proposed class action lawsuit that is still in its early stages.

The move to the new eCourts system will be “transformational,” Mecklenburg County Chief District Court Judge Elizabeth Trosch said, and will increase access, transparency and efficiency. But others worry that apparent problems in pilot counties might carry over — some acknowledged by the AOC and others outright denied.

Court records will be searchable online at no cost to the public, and attorneys and self-represented parties will be able to file court documents electronically, among other features, according to the AOC.

“I think it’s going to put court files at the fingertips of lawyers and litigants,” Trosch said. “I think it creates greater transparency, it increases access to justice.”

Courthouse staff have been prepping for the transition over the last 18 months, and Mecklenburg County has the benefit of following the first phase of the statewide roll-out, she said.

The new system launched in four pilot counties — Harnett, Johnston, Lee and Wake — earlier this year. Lawyers were quick to report problems, including private information going public, clients being wrongfully detained and the system being plain slow. The AOC delayed a May roll-out for Mecklenburg County because of the issues.

“Frankly, we have benefited greatly from the lessons learned in the pilot counties,” Trosch said.

Bugs have been fixed, new features have been added and courthouse staff have had the chance to learn how to use the system, she said.

But others in the legal system are still anxious.

Some still have eCourts concerns

A lawsuit filed in federal court in May alleged damages exceeding $5 million from eCourts. Wake County resident Timia Chaplin was arrested twice on the same warrant, and Lee County resident Paulino Castellanos was wrongly held in jail for 14 days, the complaint said.

In Chaplin’s case, on March 4 she was arrested for failing to appear in court, according to the lawsuit. It says that she was released on bond, and showed up March 16 for a new court date, where charges against her were dismissed. But she was arrested again on the failure-to-appear warrant because, although her case had been resolved, “Odyssey did not communicate that resolution to eWarrants, in contravention of the software’s intended design.”

Castellanos was arrested on Feb. 10. He was unable to pay the bond for his case, and his attorney started to work for his release, according to the lawsuit.

Castellanos has severe arthritis, which often limits his movement and confines him to a wheelchair, the lawsuit says. But Lee County officials couldn’t find his case in the new system, even as they had started the transition to digital files Feb. 13. Although his original file was lost, a formal indictment against him on Feb. 13 created a new one. Two days later he was able to move for a bond reduction. The court granted his motion that afternoon, and ordered that he be released with electronic monitoring pending trial, the lawsuit says. He was further delayed when there was “purportedly” no available monitoring device, it says.

“Had Defendants exercised due care in the adoption and implementation of eCourts, Mr. Castellanos could have moved for and received a bond reduction on the day of his arrest, avoiding spending any longer than a few hours in jail,” it said.

“As North Carolina transitions its court systems from paper to digital, hundreds of people have been unlawfully detained,” the lawsuit claimed.

The problems were foreseeable, it added, since vendor Tyler Technologies has struggled in previous software roll-outs in Texas, California, Tennessee and Indiana.

The Texas-based company was awarded a $100 million contract over 10 years to implement North Carolina’s new system.

One of the attorneys representing plaintiffs in that lawsuit, Durham-based Gagan Gupta, told The Charlotte Observer that he was surprised by Friday’s announcement. Since filing the lawsuit, he and others representing the plaintiffs have received more than 100 calls about problems stemming from eCourts, he said.

“The point of the pilot program, as we understand it, was to iron out any kinks,” he said. “I think the expectation was that those kinks would be small. Turns out those kinks are huge. And they’re so big that they are causing clear constitutional violations of people’s rights.”

In a memo to court staff Friday, AOC Director Ryan Boyce focused on highlights.

Parties have made nearly 300,000 court filings using eCourts’ File & Serve and Odyssey. Over 10,000 daily searches of court records were conducted with Portal, “resulting in countless saved trips to the courthouse and calls to the clerk’s office,” he said. And the pilot phase “has enabled AOC, pilot county staff, and our vendor to resolve software issues and make enhancements to digital court processes, resulting in a much-improved system for statewide implementation.”

Letter: Transition hasn’t been easy

Spokespersons for the AOC did not answer questions from The Charlotte Observer. But the AOC provided a letter that Boyce sent to state House Democratic Leader Robert Reives in April.

The transition “has not been easy,” Boyce admitted, adding that since Feb. 13 the AOC had logged and reported 573 defects to Tyler Technologies, the company that built the system.

“These defects range from minor configuration issues to errors within application processes that cause significant system latency,” he wrote. He added that Tyler had resolved 393 of the problems, and fixed an error that “transmitted incorrect speeds on 22 speeding citations” with the Department of Motor Vehicles’ help. The AOC mailed notices to affected drivers, letting them know about the errors, he said.

“NCAOC has identified several high priority defects that must be resolved prior to further expansion and has delayed the scheduled Mecklenburg County implementation until such resolutions are validated,” he wrote at the time.

But the AOC investigated and found no instance of an eCourts defect causing “delayed release from incarceration,” he said.

Boyce also noted work that the AOC has done to train attorneys in the four pilot counties and Mecklenburg County.

DA Merriweather asks for patience

With the roll-out pending, one local office is asking the community for patience.

“Knowing the arrival of eCourts has been imminent, we’ve been in frequent contact with court system stakeholders in pilot counties,” District Attorney Spencer Merriweather’s office said in a statement.

“We are aware those counties have faced formidable challenges in the implementation of this program,” the statement said. “While many of those challenges have been overcome, it is our understanding that others have not, as our colleagues in the pilot counties — to varying degree — continue to confront some delay in court processing and administration and data recall, among other things.”

Problems might arise here, too, the statement said.

The DA’s office asked for “patience and grace” in that event.

This story has been updated to reflect that the class action lawsuit is proposed.