This is Part 8 of 10 in the eFiling Blog Series, check out Part 7 here.
In the standard model of eFiling, a litigant (whether private or public) initiates a case by eFiling with the court. Another, sometimes overlooked, opportunity to harvest some low-hanging fruit involves court-to-court eFiling. Using eFiling to transfer matters from a trial court to an appellate court, as in appeals, or from an initiating court to a trial court, as in a bind-over, offers efficiencies, savings, and process improvement.
Consider first appeals from a trial court to an appellate court. Preparation of the Record on Appeal (RoA) is a strictly rule-driven process requiring the transfer of a broad but defined subset of the trial court’s data, metadata, and documents related to the case. Manually selecting what to send, packaging it with the prescribed order, format, and organization, creating the necessary indexes to documents, and transporting it to the appellate court consumes considerable time from one or more highly skilled knowledge workers.
On the receiving end, the appellate court must review the package for completeness and accuracy, re-enter the data and metadata on its own systems, and create its own case files. If the appellate court has its own Electronic Content Management System (ECMS) it may need to scan in the documents and enter the necessary metadata, duplicating entry again.
Appellate court implementation of eFiling for litigants continues to advance at an accelerating rate. However, many of the same appellate courts courts handle data and document intercourse with their originating courts in a fairly primitive manner, which is to say, with paper or static image documents and forms utilizing little data centricity.
By extending eFiling to the courts from which it receives appeals, the appellate court can greatly streamline its case/file setup process, as well as its interactions with the trial courts during and at the conclusion of the appellate phase. It could assure getting well organized, complete, and compliant Records on Appeal from all its constituent courts, while greatly reducing the time spent reviewing RoA’s by some of the court’s most highly skilled staff.
On the flip side, the benefits to the trial courts would be equally significant. A court with its own ECMS could configure its workflow according to the specifications of the appellate court to automatically generate the RoA. Acknowledgements, requests for further information, and case disposition (judgments, remands, etc.) would loop back to its ECMS and workflow from the appellate court.
Many of the same considerations apply in the case of moving a case from a lower appeal court to a higher level, or back again, or both. In many ways, bind-overs would be a lot simpler to configure than appellate RoA’s. Of course, what they lack in complexity they make up for in volume. Streamlining the bind-over process offers great efficiencies to both initiating and receiving courts.
In both the case of Appeals and the case of bind-overs, the filer/receiver model is usually many-to-one. That is, a trial court generally sends appeals to one appellate court (with some exceptions for appeals direct to a higher appellate court), while an appellate court generally receives appeals from many trial courts. Bind-overs likewise typically follow a similar many-to-one model.
In many, if not most places, the “sending” or “originating” court may not be responsible to the same political and/or funding authority as the “receiving” court. This reality causes the Three Rules of Funding eFiling to rear their often unbecoming heads: 1) It isn’t free; 2) Someone has to pay for it; and 3) The chosen strategy has implications. In short, a solution that should be win-win may not be considered because no one wants to pay for the whole thing.
Five years ago that might have been a persuasive argument. However, today the answer should be different, because the world is a different place. eFiling has penetrated all levels of courts. Probably the most direct strategy in this instance is to have the “receiving ” courts extend their eFiling systems to their “originating ” courts. The marginal cost to the “receiving” court would be more than offset by the resulting savings.
It sure looks like low-hanging fruit.
Coming up next: Blog 9 of 10: eFiling Blog Series – Law Firm Considerations