FCTC continues to refine court tech services
FCTC continues to refine court tech services
Senior Editor
A procession of procedural and technical improvements — from attorneys getting on and off the electronic service list to allowing judges to electronically sign orders and order documents — occupied the Florida Courts Technology Commission at its recent meeting in Orlando.
The commission also looked at coordinating with The Florida Bar to block suspended and disbarred attorneys from using the state’s electronic portal to file court papers, corrected a technical glitch to allow parents who act as guardians for their disabled children to have online access to court documents, and worked on a project to reduce the number of paper records that must be kept by clerks.
The commission is the entity designated by the Supreme Court to oversee all technology-related court issues, a demanding task as the state’s courts transition from a paper-based to an electronic-based system.
Commission member Murray Silverstein, who also serves on the Bar’s Rules of Judicial Administration Committee, said a joint FCTC/RJAC committee is looking at original documents that are required to be retained by clerks — promissory notes, wills, codicils, some notarized documents, warrants, fingerprints — and trying to slim down the list.
“We hope to substantially pare back the originals that have to be maintained by the clerks, first on the going-forward basis and then on an archival basis,” Silverstein said, adding in a lot of cases clerks are maintaining court administrative records that could easily be kept in electronic form.
The joint FCTC/RJAC committee recommended, and the FCTC approved, a rule authorizing judges to use electronic signatures in court documents, Silverstein said.
Practically, he added, this is already happening, but the Rules of Judicial Administration have not been amended to authorize electronic judicial signatures. The FCTC’s recommendation of Rule of Judicial Administration 2.515 now goes to the RJAC, which is working on the judicial signature amendment.
FCTC member John Stewart, who serves on the Bar Board of Governors and chairs its Technology Committee, said the FCTC has asked the Board of Governors for a recommendation on a closer correlation between the Bar’s member-in-good standing list and attorneys who are authorized to use the statewide e-filing portal.
“When you register to file through the e-portal, the e-portal checks your status [with the Bar] and confirms you are a member in good standing,” Stewart said. Portal staff periodically check with the Bar to make sure those registered to file have not been disbarred, but he said there’s no formal policy on checking or linking between the portal and the Bar’s continually updated active member records.
The FCTC has asked the board for a recommendation on how a closer link would be accomplished and perhaps updated as often as every day. Stewart said the issue isn’t as simple as it might seem. For example, disbarred attorneys and those suspended by the court would naturally lose their ability to file as attorneys through the portal.
But it’s a bit trickier question when, perhaps through an oversight or error, attorneys are late paying their annual membership fees or become CLE delinquent for failure to take and/or report CLE credits. Stewart noted that while such attorneys may be technically suspended administratively, there’s usually a grace period for paying delinquent fees and taking CLE to meet those requirements.
“It boils down to the balance between making sure the lawyers not in good standing cannot file through the portal, while making sure the clients are not harmed for something that is insignificant,” he said.
The FCTC decided not to change the policy of allowing lawyers to remove themselves from the electronic service list maintained by the statewide portal, Stewart said. There had been complaints when e-service first became available that attorneys were unable to remove themselves from the service list if they had been added by another party and continued to be served with documents after they were no longer a part of the case.
Eventually the portal software was changed to allow attorneys to remove themselves from a case’s e-service list, but Stewart said that raised questions about whether attorneys might improperly remove themselves as part of gamesmanship to impede service or while they were still active in the case.
“The question for the commission is ‘Do we want to go and readdress that policy?’ and the commission said, ‘No,’” Stewart said. “If attorneys are improperly opting out of service through the portal, that is an issue for the Bar or the judiciary.. . . If there was abuse, that needed to be dealt with by the Bar.”
The FCTC also continue to work on uniform format to retain court records, which will eventually also become the required format for filing through the portal. Currently, the portal accepts Word and PDF documents. Eventually that will switch, Stewart said, to what is known as the PDF/A format.
One issue related to that, he said, is there is no free program for PDF/A (which is optimized for the long-term storage of electronic records) available at the moment, although the Word program may have a converter for PDF/A.
Stewart said the switch to PDF/A won’t be made until court clerks, who are storing records in the TIFF format, are ready for the change.
Laird Lile, another FCTC member who also serves on the Board of Governors, said the commission also worked on expanding what mediators can electronically file and handling sealed documents through the portal.
The FCTC also fixed a technical glitch in the “security matrix” that governs online access to court records. Lile said the problem, pointed out by attorneys Joseph P. George, Jr., and Marisol Vilasuso, unintentionally blocked parents who petitioned the courts to become guardians for their disabled children from online records they needed.
Lile noted than many of the issues addressed at the meeting, while important, might seem relatively minor given major recent changes, such as the beginning and now near universal usage by attorneys of electronic filing for the courts and the continuing conversion to an electronic court system. (The portal for e-filing is under the jurisdiction of the Florida Court’s E-Filing Authority, which contracts with the Florida Court Clerks & Comptrollers for its operation.)
“The changes being discussed in 2017 are tweaks and, frankly, minor adjustments to a system that five years ago did not even exist. The State of Florida should be proud and appreciative of the progress, and the Legislature and Gov. [Rick] Scott should seriously adequately fund these important functions that will continue to save operational costs for the judicial branch and for all lawyers practicing in Florida,” Lile said.
