Conflict is simmering between two of Virginia’s more obscure yet influential political actors — the administrators of the state court system and the elected Circuit Court Clerks who keep legal records of lawsuits, land deals, financial claims and handle the probate matters that in most other states are the province of judges.
The issue: how to handle electronic case records for civil lawsuits.
The court system administrator — the Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court of Virginia — wants to create a statewide system.
The clerks want to know why they can’t go shopping for the systems that are already on the market — systems that they believe could be less costly and would be easier to adapt for each circuit court’s distinctive features.
The dispute comes as records of OES budgeting and actual spending on projects — a comparison that a blistering recent state audit on the agency’s management of its assets suggested would be useful to adopt — suggests spending on IT work is on the rise this year. The records, requested under the Freedom of Information Act but supplied by the OES with the caveat that FOIA does not apply to it.
Other OES records, supplied in the same way, suggest some of the agency’s biggest IT projects have run behind schedule and over initial budget. Its effort to rewrite the court system’s financial management system, a project started in 2009, was according to a 2015 report expected to cost $6.3 million and be completed in 2016. By last year, the new completion date, the cost had climbed to $9.2 million, a 47 percent increase. The rewriting of the case management system for general district courts, an effort started in 2011 and projected to cost $6.8 million in 2015 also ran late, with a new projected cost of $7.3 million.
Last year, the General Assembly directed the OES and court clerks to set up a working group to look at the benefits and challenges of putting in place a statewide system for filing civil cases electronically and for a subscription service allowing access to the documents filed in such cases — something rather like what the federal courts offer.
The basic difference in approach — the OES saying “we can do it,” the clerks saying “we’ve like to be able to shop for what’s available” — remained.
That said, the two sides did agree on some points. One, that any requirement that clerks adopt a single statewide e-filing system could be costly for clerk’s offices, some of which complain they can’t collect enough fees for a OES-run electronic records subscription service to cover OES’s charges for that system. Two, that opting for an approach other than the current e-filing system OES has set up (and plans to spend $1.2 million on this fiscal year) and that 35 clerks offices now use would mean a loss of the investment OES has already made.
Another point from the work group: money matters. A single statewide system for viewing civil case documents would mean fees for that service would go to OES, and the 92 clerks who now use the current system would lose the fees they now collect and from which they pay OES.
The cost of switching to a single statewide e-filing system is hard to estimate, since a basic building block of that system the OES’s case management system, isn’t used by two of the biggest courts in the state, Fairfax county and Alexandria. The working group did note that the cost of converting Fairfax County to that case management system would be “exorbitant” and would take more than two years to complete.
Although the work group looking at the issue of a statewide civil case system didn’t mention this, an Auditor of Public Accounts review completed shortly before the work group issued its report, found that OES had improperly recorded the judicial system’s capital assets, did not do enough to fix a problem with tracking software development costs highlighted in 2013 and did not do a physical inventory of capital assets or evaluate the useful life of those assets.
