Court experiments with e-filing
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By CLARENCE MABIN / Lincoln Journal Star
At 28, Tony Demma doesn’t look like a dinosaur on the verge of extinction.
Yet Demma, a legal documents runner for a Lincoln attorney, is part of a time-honored tradition that, like personal letter-writing, might be in its final days.
Last month, Sue Kirkland, Clerk of the Lancaster County District Court, launched a pilot program for the electronic filing of legal documents. The program — just one more instance of the general societal shift toward paperless transactions — is voluntary, at least so far, Kirkland said.
“Twenty-nine states have e-filing or are training for it,” she said. “E-filing is the future. There’s no hiding from it.”
Nebraska state court administrators selected Lancaster County District Court and Sarpy County Court for the pilot program, which began Feb. 12 at the district court in Lincoln.
Bill Miller, deputy state court administrator for information technology, said a technology sub-committee will review the program this summer. Any final decisions to make electronic filing mandatory for all state courts rest with the Nebraska Supreme Court, he said.
“It would be several years before it would become mandatory,” Miller said. “We still need to review what’s good with it, what more needs to be done. ... That’s one reasons why you do pilots.”
Nebraska’s federal courts began requiring attorneys to e-file documents in January 2003 after an eight-month test period. Laypeople acting as their own attorneys are exempt from the requirement, although they can choose to e-file.
At least initially, grumbling was palpable within the attorney ranks, recalled Therese Bollerup, chief deputy clerk for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska.
“Attorneys are not exactly agents of change,” she said. “There was an enormous amount of resistance.”
But over time, she said, resistance turned to acceptance and then, for many lawyers, open embrace.
“There’s an attorney here who says it’s revolutionized the way he practices law,” said Bollerup, who works in the federal court clerk office in Omaha.
“He now works out of his home, doesn’t need a (full-time) secretary or even file cabinets. He got rid of his runner.”
The move to paperless filings has also transformed clerks’ offices in Lincoln and Omaha, Bollerup said.
“It’s like a ghost town at the front desk,” she said. “Now, the only people we see are the (nonattorney) filers.”
The transformation to ghost town is unlikely to repeat itself in Kirkland’s office, at not any time soon.
For one thing, several types of cases, including protection orders, criminal and juvenile cases and injunctions, can’t be e-filed. For another, only a handful of attorneys, so far, have volunteered to electronically file documents, Kirkland said.
An early disincentive, she said, was the cost: $6 a filing, compared to filing a document the old-fashioned way for the cost of a runner, or of a postage stamp and envelope.
Kirkland said the service provider, LexisNexis, lowered the cost to $1 within a week of the start of the program. Even so, she said, lawyers have been reluctant to e-file.
“The cost, initially, was prohibitive,” she said. “Now, I think it’s really just getting them to give it a try.”
A computer with Internet access and Word or Word Perfect software — these days, standard features in most offices — are all that’s needed to e-file, Kirkland said. Free training is available, she said.
“There are just so many advantages to e-filing,” she said.
“It will cut down on paper and photocopying. It’s instantaneous, and you can file 24 hours a day from anywhere. There’s no need to wait for runners or the U.S. mail.”
Lincoln attorney Herb Friedman agreed.
“Once you get used to it, it’s slicker than a whistle,” he said. “It’s certainly the wave of the future.”
Friedman said he understood and, to a point, agreed with complaints about the cost to electronically file.
“There’s some controversy within the bar (about the cost) ... and I don’t think you should have to pay for it.
“(But) when you figure the cost of a runner, and gasoline,” Friedman continued, “hypothetically, you could be paying $6 already.”
Tony Rager, human resources facilitator at Cline Williams, said cost has been the overriding concern at the Lincoln law firm.
“One of the things we looked at is cost,” he said. “If our runners’ cost is offset by that, we’ll probably use it more.”
Cline Williams, the largest law firm in Lincoln, usually employs 10 to 14 part-time runners, about half of whom typically are pre-law students, said Rager, who added that a partner at the firm was once a runner.
“It’s a good way to see how law firms operate,” Rager said. “The tradition is there.”
Even if state courts convert to mandatory electronic filing, Rager said, Cline Williams would still need runners. He said the federal court’s conversion in 2003 had no effect on the number of runners at the firm.
“There’d be no drop-off,” he said. “They do the oddball things, like deliver documents to clients, really more than they go to courts.”
But what all this means for Demma, a fine arts major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who has been running for Lincoln attorney Bill Chapin off and on since 1997, is unclear.
At least at first glance, Demma would appear to have reason to worry.
After all, Chapin said in an interview, e-filing offers lawyers many advantages, among them, not having to “worry about running stuff over to court.”
And, the attorney said, e-filing was more likely to have a greater effect on support staff at smaller offices — like his — than at the Cline Williamses of the world.
Yet Demma’s job seems secure.
For one thing, only about 20 minutes of his day is spent running documents to state district court, he said.
For another, Chapin is his stepfather.
“It’s (e-filing) probably going to mean he’ll have more time to read his books,” Chapin said.
Reach Clarence Mabin at cmabin@journalstar.com or 473-7234.
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