Oakland eFiling program receives award for excellence

Tyler Technologies, a leader in public sector software, announced it will present the Tyler Public Sector Excellence Award to the Sixth Circuit Court of Oakland County for its eFiling program. The award that honors the very best in organizational efficiency, responsiveness, and productivity, will be officially handed out during the Court Technology Conference on Oct. 3, in Long Beach, California. Lisa Czyz, eFiling court lead, will accept the award on behalf of the Circuit Court. Although eFiling had already been proven in federal court and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Oakland County was the first to venture so extensively into an Internet-based eFiling system that both files and electronically serves court documents. Recognition of Oakland's eFiling system highlights the court's success of putting business processes and technology in place to create the state's first "true" paperless efiling service. Before eFiling, all documents were filed in a traditional manner. Litigants or their representatives would drive to the courthouse and wait in line at the Clerk's Office. At the counter, clerks would accept legal filings and required fees. Documents would be scanned and filed in the court file. On hearing days, boxes and boxes of files would be picked up from the Clerk's Office and delivered to members of the bench. Physical storage space was an ongoing problem. Oakland's eFiling initiative debuted in 2007 with one judge and 300 civil cases as a combined effort of the County Clerk's Office, the Circuit Court, the Department of Information Technology, and vendor Wiznet/Tyler Technologies. Presented with challenging criteria, such as managing pro bono and indigent filers, and not requiring users to purchase additional software in order to efile, Tyler provided its Web-based system, Odessey File & Serve, to replicate the Court's paper-intensive process electronically. Today, the program has expanded to 18,646 cases with 11,410 users from more than 5,160 law firms. Filings have reached 250,729--a savings of over one million pieces of paper. EFiling is mandatory on all civil cases in the Circuit Court. Additionally, the program has been extended to three family division judges for their DO (divorce without children) cases. Efiling has eliminated geographic barriers giving users access to case documents from anywhere there is an Internet connection. For a minimal fee, users are able to efile 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Paper files that traditionally took one day to process, may now be reviewed in just a matter of minutes. Scanning, filing, storing, and retrieving paper documents are no longer necessary. To gain even more efficiencies, Oakland's IT Department enhanced the eFiling package to route documents after efiling. Courts are now able to conduct paperless hearings. It also gave users the ability to create court forms electronically to be efiled and served to parties in a case. "In a time of budget cuts, shrinking personnel resources, and increasing caseloads," said Circuit Chief Judge Nanci Grant, "Oakland's eFiling system has proven itself many times over to be an effective tool that increases efficiencies and reduces costs for litigants, the County Clerk's Office, and the court alike." Free training on how to efile is regularly scheduled at the Oakland County Courthouse. To see a listing of classes or to learn more about the court's eFiling service, click on the Wiznet efiling link at: www.oakgov.com/circuit. To learn more about Tyler Technologies, visit www.tylertech.com. Published: Mon, Mar 21, 2011

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