Digital eCourts launches July in Buncombe County: Court slowdown, disruption incoming?

ASHEVILLE — In the next four months, the Buncombe County Courthouse will undergo a digital overhaul, switching to the state's new cloud-hosted court software that has plagued other North Carolina counties with sluggish loading screens, court slowdowns and even unlawful detention, some claim.

Buncombe County, along with 10 other counties in Western North Carolina, will transition to eCourts on July 22 — the next step in the state's phased rollout to groups of counties over the last year, as announced by the N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts. The suite of eCourts is managed by Texas-based Tyler Technologies Inc. and includes a case management system the state calls "Enterprise Justice."

Some local court officials say the transition will greatly expand public access to the court system and allow for more transparency in due process. Others are wary of delays and potential setbacks from a system currently at the center of a growing federal lawsuit that’s seeking class-action status.

The lawsuit now names sheriffs and Superior Court clerks of three different counties — Mecklenburg, Wake and Lee — as defendants and alleges the eCourts launch in those counties caused hundreds to be unlawfully detained, others to spend days and weeks longer than necessary in jail, or to be arrested multiple times under the same warrant, even after charges were dismissed by a judge. That's according to an amended complaint filed Feb. 28 and obtained by the Citizen Times.

Brad Fowler, the chief business officer with AOC, came to Buncombe County March 8 for a “very preliminary meeting” to start coordinating the process of transition. He met with the clerks, a Superior Court judge, Chief District Court Judge J. Calvin Hill, District Attorney Todd Williams and Chief Public Defender Sam Snead, according to Clerk of Court Jean Marie Christy.

Christy said the judicial team will meet once a week between now and July 22 when the system will be officially launched for use in the courthouse and for the public. Those meetings are not open to the public.

The Citizen Times reached out to Hill but did not receive a response before press time.

"Per AOC themselves, this is perhaps the biggest court system transition since the unification of the court system in the '60s," Williams told the Citizen Times March 14.

Previous reporting: Digital eCourts system at center of a federal lawsuit is coming to Buncombe County

A disrupted district court with more workers needed

In the initial meeting March 8, Fowler said the District Criminal Court has been the most affected or disrupted by the new system in other parts of the state, according to Snead. Snead thinks this has to do with volume, because historically, district court handles as many as a few hundred cases a day, he said.

“It makes a lot of sense when you think about it, that it would be the most disrupted because it’s probably the most labor-intensive court,” Snead said.

Currently, the clerk in district court makes notations on physical court calendars during proceedings and can push the time it takes to update paper filings and the computer system to the end of the day. With the new system, there will be real time changes to the files as they go, Snead said.

“When a file is in court, when something happens in court – like a case is continued, or a case is pled, or a case is tried – all that information will be updated in real time once the case concludes,” Snead said.

Zack Ezor, the plaintiffs' attorney for the federal lawsuit first filed in May, described what attorneys refer to as the “spinning wheel of death,” in which something as mundane as electronic signature via eCourts can be slowed by a buggy loading screen.

"That's what I think most people would refer to as 'the issue,'" Ezor told the Citizen Times in January. "It's just slow. Which for a piece of software that was supposed to revolutionize case processing, it's really disappointing."

More: Malfunctioning Buncombe court video monitor may violate detainees' rights, break state law

As Snead described it, if everything is happening in real time, and there’s, say, 400 button presses that take 20 seconds to load during a half day of court, those delays accumulate. The "lag time" means that some attorneys once handling 50 cases in a day, such as in traffic court, are down to 10 in counties already using the system, Ezor said.

"The software has no problem handling civil and slow-moving, big criminal cases," Williams said. "It's the high turnover, the big dockets, the very quick speeding ticket-type cases that the system does not seem to adapt well to."

Snead noted that this system may require more clerks to be in the court room during proceedings. Christy also said she thinks the system will require more staffing, and she’s waiting on approval from Raleigh to get funding for new hires at the clerk's office.

The district attorney also said he hopes the legislature will provide funding for the Buncombe County DA's office to hire more positions, which he said hasn't been allocated to the county in close to 20 years.

More: Buncombe district court judge forum: Bail bonds, criminal justice reform, jail disparity

Court slowdown: How long will it last?

Snead said the public defender’s office has been advised to reduce their calendars, or the number of cases they bring before a judge on any given day, particularly for the beginning of the rollout. Williams confirmed the DA's office is doing the same.

The chief public defender said he thinks it’s “inevitable” that this will slow down individual cases as they go through the court system, at least in the short term.

"We have already — not unlike what we did during COVID — began to set cases, when we're talking about minor traffic matters, out farther so that we're not going to be dealing with very large, unwieldy and unmanageable dockets in late July and early August," Williams said.

Noting that a crime committed today or in April may be set for a hearing in June, July or maybe even August, Williams said they've "advised law enforcement that we've got to set those matters out farther than they would ordinarily be set now."

Williams said how long this slowdown will last depends on how Tyler Technologies and AOC implements the system here and how "properly we adapt."

A total of 17 counties have transitioned from paper to Enterprise Justice (formerly Odyssey), a platform that provides online access to digital courthouse records. In the July 22 rollout phase, 11 WNC counties will go online, including Buncombe, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, Polk, Swain and Transylvania counties.

Snead said he’s heard “a lot” of complaints and concerns from criminal defense attorneys in other counties, including Wake County, home to Raleigh — the first large county to transition to eCourts.

“(The complaints) are mainly on how disruptive it is to the work that they kind of got used to … the enormous disruption it is to their workflow in court,” Snead said. “The routine tasks that we did before — how do we get them done now? They seem to be very different, seem to be much slower and difficult to accomplish.”

More: Court monitor fiasco: ACLU, legal advocates and district court candidates question waivers

'Difficult but necessary': How will Buncombe avoid problems other counties faced?

After months spent prepping for the transition in Mecklenburg County — home to Charlotte — the highest-volume courthouse in the state, lawyers say defendants experienced prolonged stays in jail and wrongful arrests over already-dismissed warrants, the Charlotte Observer reported.

Regarding how these issues will be mitigated in Buncombe County, Christy said “a lot of those issues have been addressed” in the 12 counties that have gone live since Mecklenburg went live with the system.

“We are doing everything we can, but it’s extremely early in the process,” Christy said.

Williams said he visited Mecklenburg County to look at the system in operation and spoke with District Attorney Spencer B. Merriweather III "several times."

"Data integrity, privacy, victim security, defendants getting released when they're supposed to be released, accurate information being kept in public record — all those are concerns," Williams said. "In my trip to Mecklenburg County, I was somewhat encouraged that the system does perform. It's going to be different, and it may not perform as well as we'd like, but hopefully we'll make it work and we'll mitigate the problems that the initial counties saw."

Court officials also listed some positives of the new technology, including easier access for pro-se litigants to file lawsuits and real-time access for the public to view court documents. Christy said they plan to train librarians on how to use the website, so they can assist people wanting to use the software on library public computers.

“I expect it to be difficult, but I also think that it’s necessary in the modernization of the court,” Snead said. “It’s just something that we’ve been putting off for decades, literally, and it just needs to happen. There’s never going to be a good time, and it’s going to be completely unpleasant and extremely frustrating.”

Ryley Ober is the Public Safety Reporter for Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Email her at rober@gannett.com and follow her on Twitter @ryleyober

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Buncombe County to launch court system facing growing federal lawsuit