Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $1 Million?

Wednesday, March 13, 2013 | 0

The Florida Bar News recently featured an article, “Mandatory e-filing in civil cases begins in April.” This article also described how the e-filing Authority Board has “asked the Legislature for $1.1 million to fund a help desk to assist lawyers with e-filing.” Perhaps I am naive, but this funding request seems unnecessary.

Lawyers are smart people. I find it difficult to believe that there are many attorneys out there that really need significant assistance with such a rudimentary process as e-filing. Most have purchased books from Amazon, plane tickets from Travelocity, or items from eBay. They are already familiar with the internet, and their staff likely more so. The Leon County Clerk is quoted in the Bar News article. He says “My full expectation is come April 1, most of the filings will come in by paper . . . most of the attorneys will ignore it [the e-filing deadline].” He explains that despite his office’s effort at educating attorneys, only 10% of his circuit’s filings are being submitted electronically.

If e-filing saves attorneys money, they will come. If e-filing saves attorneys time, they will come. As the voice kept telling Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come.” This is likely true, but only if “you build it right.” That is, build it so that it saves lawyers time and money. The corollary will naturally be true. That is, build it right, to save lawyers time and money and it will likewise save the clerks, courts and state money.

The Office of Judges of Compensation Claims initiated electronic filing in 2005. Early adopters were admittedly few and far between. The early adopters will remember that the OJCC did not even publicize the existence of e-filing, the early adopters fortuitously found the new process on our website. This handful of practitioners saw the benefits of the program and became regular users. They saved time and money. They were complimentary, and their enthusiasm was infectious. They spread the word and others followed. Attorneys followed those leaders to the process because it saved them time and money. They followed because using e-filing made sense economically to them.

In 2006, we began promoting e-filing. We conducted seminars in multiple cities. We used some commercial software and built some online tutorials. From a few hundred e-filed documents monthly, the OJCC grew to about 40,000 e-filed documents monthly. In 2010, the Florida Legislature made e-filing mandatory for represented parties in workers’ compensation. This was the culmination of a gradual process. The benefits of e-filing drew users to the process. The mandate to use it followed years of voluntary transition. During those transition years, people learned to use and accept the process. During those years the attorneys who advocated for the process showed their friends, partners and even opponents how to use this process to save time and money.

The Florida Supreme Court has set an April 1 deadline for mandatory electronic filing in the state civil trial courts. E-filing was mandatory with the Supreme Court on Feb. 27. The Court’s transition over months will be more traumatic than our OJCC transition over years.

The courts e-filing Authority Board admits that fine tuning of the e-filing portal remains. It is unclear whether the clerks can or will enforce the April 1, 2013 deadline. Will they turn away paper filings? According to the Bar News article, the clerks remain unclear on whether they have the authority to do so. The Supreme Court clerk says he will do so, effective Feb. 27. How the clerks handle this transition will affect how attorneys and staff react to civil e-filing. The more assistance and patience they provide, the better the transition will go.

Of all the issues the Authority is currently discussing, the most troubling is their request for a $1.1 million dollar appropriation from the Legislature, primarily to fund a 10-employee “help desk to assist lawyers with e-filing.” The personnel for this help desk will perhaps require some training, in order to be the new trainers for attorneys.

However, the e-filing Authority Board needs to recognize that e-filing creates a variety of economic benefits for litigants and for the clerks. When e-filed documents arrive at the clerk’s office, for example, there is no need to open paper envelopes, straighten pages, pull staples or scan documents. These tasks are avoided, and the e-filing process allows clerk staff to instead manage images of documents which have been scanned and filed by the case parties. In short, processing images (PDF) is much less labor-intensive than processing paper.

This means that clerks across Florida will have less workload managing and processing paper. These existing employees already have a significant knowledge in the filing process. They can be trained to better understand the new electronic filing alternative. They can then put that knowledge base to work assisting the attorneys, and their staff, who require help with e-filing. These existing clerk employees, already funded in current budget allocations, can easily provide the assistance that is required through the transition to e-filing. They can transition from opening envelopes and scanning documents to being the local “help desk” in their community and can assist their customers.

The Office of Judges of Compensation Claims made the transition to e-filing eight years ago. The OJCC has never requested any special appropriation to support this new electronic paradigm. No help desk funding has been sought. Existing resources within this agency have been scraped together, effectively managed, and leveraged for the good of this marketplace. To date, the OJCC has not yet invested a total of $1 million in developing, deploying and marketing this sophisticated and efficient e-filing system. Just as the deployment of this program was done with existing resources, the OJCC has retrained and reallocated existing human resources to provide support and training for attorneys and paralegals.

Granted, we are a small agency. Granted, the volume of attorney customers and the volume of documents will be larger in civil proceedings. However, the volume of clerk support in the civil system is likewise much larger. The impact of e-filing on civil clerks' workload will be proportional. As the need for paper-handlers in the various clerks' offices decreases, those people can be trained to provide phone support for the attorneys that remain unsure of how to proceed. Thus, the agency that enjoys the benefits of e-filing reallocates its resources to support it. At the outset, this will stress existing clerk resources. However, the benefits of e-filing will rapidly follow, and a million dollar help-desk investment can be foregone.

Attorneys should note the Feb. 27 deadline for Supreme Court electronic filings and April 1 date for civil trial court e-filings. Attorneys should note the October 1 deadline for all criminal filings. And the deadlines for the District Courts, July 22 for the 2nd District Court of Appeal, Sept. 27 for the 3rd DCA, Oct. 31 for the 4th DCA, Nov. 27 for the 5th DCA, and Dec. 27 for the 1st DCA. Notably, the 1st and the 5th have been using e-filing for years, to the delight of their customers. The federal courts have been likewise.

Between all of these experiences, on the net generally, OJCC e-filing (e-JCC), Administrative Law e-filing (e-ALJ), the appellate courts (e-DCA), and the federal courts (PACER), there are a great number of Florida lawyers and paralegals who are already comfortable with e-filing and ready to proceed with the new paradigm in Florida’s trial courts. Those that are not will transition rapidly. A great many attorneys have already proven that they can do so on the platforms mentioned above.

David Langham is deputy chief judge of the Florida Office of Judges of Compensation Claims. This column was reprinted with his permission from his Florida Workers' Comp Adjudication blog.