Mississippi's court system is now fully online. Here's how it happened
Nathan Evans, the director of the Mississippi Electronic Courts, said in a news release from the Administrative Office of the Courts, that the successful statewide implementation of the system marks a historic milestone for the judiciary.
'With both appellate courts and all 188 Chancery, Circuit and County Courts now operating on a single, centralized case management and e-filing system, we have taken a significant leap in efficiency, transparency, and access to justice for the public we serve,' Evans said.
Electronic court implementation was voluntary in trial courts until the Legislature passed HB 25 in 2020, which Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law, requiring local trial courts to be fully integrated with the electronic system by July 2, 2021.
But court leaders at the time notified state officials that it would be impossible to meet the statutory deadline and asked the Legislature to appropriate more money for the court to integrate all trial courts into the electronic system more quickly.
The Legislature did not provide more money for court officials to complete the job of training local chancery and circuit clerk employees in every corner of the state on how to use the system, but court officials proceeded with the Herculean task.
Still, the achievement means that attorneys can electronically file legal briefs in every state court, and the public can view court documents through the Mississippi Electronic Court system by subscribing to the system and paying a 20-cents per-page viewing fee.
If citizens still want to view court documents without paying the MEC viewing fee, they can go to the proper courthouse and look at the legal filings on the public court terminal.
'Now, our judges, district attorneys, public defenders, and attorneys can access and file documents instantly,' Rankin County Circuit Clerk Michelle Adcock said in the news release. 'It's a game changer for courtroom efficiency and transparency. This just streamlines justice and increases public access to court records.'
But before the court's recent announcement, it took a performance storm almost 20 years ago that involved a whiteboard in Canton, the U.S. Senate's seniority system and a gift from the federal court for Mississippi's electronic court system to get off the ground.
When then-Supreme Court Justice Bill Waller Jr. read an article in a newspaper around 2005 saying that Hinds County would start allowing attorneys to partially 'e-file' court documents, he knew the state Supreme Court should get involved.
Waller, an associate justice of the court at the time, realized that if the state's highest court didn't step in and provide some guidance on an electronic system, then the state could eventually have a patchwork of different programs. So, he encouraged Chief Justice James Smith to create a task force exploring electronic courts.
Justice Smith followed Waller's advice and formed a committee of judges, court clerks and attorneys. Soon, the task force began meeting and listened to a presentation from J.T. Noblin, the clerk of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.
Noblin walked the task force members through how attorneys and judges used the federal electronic filing system that was in place across federal district courts in the country. After the presentation, Arthur Johnston, the Madison County chancery clerk who served on the committee, had an epiphany.
'A light went on in my head that said we have so many lawyers in the state who are familiar with that federal system,' Johnston said. 'I wondered if that could be the system that we adopt. Justice Waller thought that was a splendid idea.'
Members of the task force traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, Mississippi's senior senator, who served as chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, to discuss the federal electronic court system.
Cochran used his position as chairman of the committee to slip a provision into the federal judiciary's appropriation bill that required the federal courts to give the Mississippi court system its federal electronic software and code for free, saving state taxpayers a large sum of money.
After the legislation passed, the wonky and technical work of actually creating a Mississippi version of the federal system began.
Madison County Chancery Court was the first to attempt to roll out an electronic court, but there was one main snag in trying to copy the federal judiciary's electronic system: the Chancery Court system dealt with different types of cases than federal court.
Federal courts typically deal with criminal and civil cases, similar to Mississippi's Circuit Court system. But the Chancery Court deals with estates, adoption, custody, divorce and questions about the Mississippi Constitution.
To iron out the issues, Johnston and his deputy clerks — Kim Seivers, Lakisha Jones-Clay and Stacey Toten — worked out of a room in the local WIN Job Center and converted it into a 'war room.'
Each afternoon, the employees would look through Chancery Court cases and create a corresponding description in the database to create its electronic system. The work eventually paid off because Madison County accepted the first electronic case in 2008.
'We would make notes on a dry-erase board on the problems we ran into,' Johnston said.
The work in the war room eventually created a template that other courts across the state, with the help of the Administrative Office of the Courts, would replicate.
While the work took decades to complete, Waller hopes that ultimately the openness that comes with an electronic court can improve the public's image of the judiciary, and make attorneys' jobs easier.
'It's a beautiful success story for the state,' Waller said. 'There's no doubt about it.'
___
This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
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