 You're watching FJTN, the Federal Judicial Television Network. The federal court's changeover to case management, electronic case filing has been underway for some time. The Federal Judicial Center's educational magazine program, Court to Court, has dealt with CMECF several times, visiting courts and learning from staff and judges their experiences and making the new system work. The FJC is presenting these segments again as a comprehensive look at courts undertaking CMECF. Keep in mind that in some cases, not all the individuals you'll hear are still in the positions they were at the time the segments were produced. Court to Court first visited two prototype courts, the bankruptcy court for the Southern District of New York and the District Court for the Western District of Missouri. We wanted a basic understanding of what CMECF means to the courts. ECF is a new format that we're using to file cases in the federal court. It actually stands for electronic case filing. It's a technique by which attorneys use the internet to actually dial up our computers and technically docket their own pleadings with the federal court. Currently we are asked to have 25 civil rights cases using the electronic case files prototype system and we have six active judges who are participating. Our judges are participating at different levels. We have several who have said put all of my cases in the program. We have some who have taken a wait and see attitude. We had to make sure that those judges who wanted to have paper copies of documents would continue to be able to have those paper copies. There was a need for the prototype courts to reexamine the federal rules of civil procedure and the local rules to accommodate electronic filing. We included in the rules committee three district judges, a magistrate judge, and a representative from the clerk's office. We thought it was important that the judges be involved early on in the process in the development of this program. The main rule issues that we had to identify were how to ensure authentication of documents that were electronically filed for purposes of rule 11, for example, what constituted a signature. And so we had to identify those things such as how to get the password that constituted the signature. That was included in the administrative order while the rule itself indicated that the password would be the equivalent of a signature. We also had to be concerned about how to do notification. Once something was electronically filed, how did we ensure that the opposing party knew that something had been electronically filed? We decided that electronic notification was sufficient. I am Judge Lowry's courtroom deputy in the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri. We currently have one case that is up and going on ECF that's actually moving right along. The case has had several motions filed in it. The court has issued three or four orders in the case, so I've had an opportunity to process those orders. It's different in that the courtroom deputy has more involvement in processing the orders. Right now, whenever a motion is ruled on by the court issuing an order on an ECF case, the order comes to the courtroom deputy and the courtroom deputy processes and dockets that order. What ECF has brought to us is the need for community outreach, a public relations piece that we've never had before in the federal court system. What our court has done so far is created brochures and done mailings to area attorneys and provided demonstrations either at the court site or at attorneys' law firm. My name is Bill Terry. I'm the Operations Manager for the Western District of Missouri. I'm going to show you how easy it is to file a motion using the electronic case filing system. First of all, we'll select Western District of Missouri document filing system from our home page and we'll put our login ID and password in here. We've so far demonstrated ECF to over 800 individuals. Oh, the attorneys love it. The attorneys love ECF. It's so easy for them to use. The court's files are available to them 24 hours a day. There's no more running last minute to the courthouse. They get their orders and the other documents so quickly. Everybody wants to know how secure is this? From the AO, we are hearing that the National Security Council has reviewed all the firewalls, all the connectivity and determined that second only to their system, this is one of the most secure government operations they've seen. Right now we have 13 cases on here. We are still prototyping. We're approaching the end of the prototype period and the AO has used the prototype to measure volume and how is the security system working. We're hoping to get 25 cases on within the next 30 days. We're excited about being a prototype project because that means that we can develop the system as it goes and we've already done that. Attorneys call us and say this didn't work for us so we're able to say we'll change it for you and that's just absolutely outstanding opportunity. It's been extremely easy to get those changes that we've needed because I've called the AO and like I said, sometimes within 24 hours it's the way I wanted it to be. The culture of the court has changed because historically the court has taken in an enormous amount of paper and created an enormous amount of paper and right now we're moving to an electronic medium where there is no paper available. There is a situation where on our ECF case I did not get a motion that I needed and what I would normally do, this was a Jefferson City case, I would call Jefferson City and tell them to fax that motion to me. Since it was an ECF case I was able to get into ECF, I click on that motion and I printed the entire motion out just as it appears in the original file so I can see it's going to be great. That early enthusiasm in the Western District of Missouri was shared by the Southern District of New York's bankruptcy court. We also learned how the court dealt with some of the early questions surrounding procedural rules. In the prototype for the Southern District of New York bankruptcy court electronic case filing means that we're doing bringing text files to the court through the internet. So as much as possible every document comes in an electronic format, in an electronic text format. Now all chapter 11 cases filed in 1998 go on the electronic case filing system. We have 409 cases. Now that for us a case is a bankruptcy case and an adversary proceeding. Any given day between 650 to 700 people access our system. We're over 6,000 docket entries. There are quite a number of issues presented by moving from a paper to an electronic format. One of the most difficult and critical of those issues is what to do with Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure which is also applicable in bankruptcy cases. That rule of course provides that an attorney's signature is a certification as to the good faith in essence behind the argument that the attorney is making or the factual assertion that the attorney is making. And what we finally arrived at was to give out to each attorney rather than to each firm a password to use the system and we have implemented through our standing order which I have signed a provision that says that the use of a password is equivalent to a signature on a piece of paper and we have very carefully schooled the users of the system that they should not be willy nilly giving a password out to just anybody but should keep control of them for that reason. Another of the issues concerned when we still had to use paper because the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure in some instances provide that you have to give people notice of various milestones in cases and most creditors don't have access to the Internet or at least we don't know whether they have access to the Internet so we concluded that in certain types of matters we still had to use paper. We're pretty excited about the fact that we've trained over 500 attorneys to use the electronic case filing system and that a good portion of those 500 attorneys are using it. We offer training. The purpose of this presentation is to... We urge them to take training early on. Attorney's information. Case administrators much more are becoming quality reviewers rather than hands-on docketing. They are looking at what is being filed and offering guidance to attorneys on how to more economically file because the concept of docketing has changed. Initially when we started the attorneys were a little apprehensive after we gave them adequate training and one-on-one help regarding the electronic filing it was pretty much easy transition for them. The attorneys became more dependent on us. Anything from technical questions to docketing questions is solely we was in control of that and once they knew they had ample help everything was smooth. Basically the support that we provide for the attorneys is anywhere from installing of the application, installing of personal computers and also helping them docket their first motions. What excites me about electronic filing is that the courts have taken a giant leap forward and I think we have taken the attorneys by storm at this point. I think the most exciting thing for me in putting this system in place was first the idea of creating something so new and so different. Moreover our help desk make sure that you get a live voice. When you call in no voicemail no promise to call back but a live person someone in automation who's prepared to hold your hand and take you through it we will have our entire system not only chapter elevens but sevens, thirteens, three oh fours every case that's filed here we're going to have it on the system before December 1999 so in that sense we are at the cutting edge. The greatest benefit is that it has enabled us to process an ever-growing caseload with an ever-diminishing staff. Frankly we embarked on this project not because we thought it would be a novelty and a lark but because it was absolutely essential for us we were finding that we were having difficulty processing the enormous amount of paper that came through the court and we had to figure out a way to do this more effectively and efficiently while still providing to the bar the same level of service that we provided previously and indeed with electronic filing the level of service that we're able to provide is actually increased dramatically because not only the judges but the public at large anyone with access to the internet even if they have only a read-only password to the system can see any of our documents at any time A key concern of many individuals in and out of the courts is training for the bar court to court followed up those initial segments by speaking to the chief judge and the clerk of the court in the northern district of Ohio one of the early prototype courts we also returned to the bankruptcy court in the southern district of new york and talked to attorneys from firms large and small Felix Garcia is a new york attorney who handles many bankruptcy cases he was wary of electronic case filing at first I was a little worried about this new type of filing because it was not familiar to me we're all humans and we're all resistant to change and this is a significant institutional change it's a cultural change in nineteen ninety six the district court for the northern district of Ohio mandated that all pleadings in the specialized maritime asbestos litigation be filed electronically through the internet the court has received more than one hundred sixty five thousand pleadings four sixteen thousand cases i would say that the greatest impediment to the bars utilization of electronic case filing is their lack of familiarity and understanding of the system because of not knowing how to uh... not knowing much about this new type of filing I did hesitate Garcia overcame his hesitation with the help of the staff of the southern district of new york bankruptcy court when the chapter seven uh... filers came along and realized that they actually were saving the the money either time our money by doing it in their firms they became avid fans of the system gives me flexibility i'm able to uh... file these petitions uh... at any time i don't have to uh... commit myself to filing during business hours or during the hours that the court is open garcia's use has grown dramatically i'd say about about fifty percent of my chapter seven petitions uh... through this uh... through the electric electronic case filing system larger firms working with morris's clerk's office are also enthusiastic we saw that as an opportunity to move forward on something that perceived and i think correctly uh... would be uh... the wave of the future but the future means a cultural change at increased speed and convenience only goes so far in getting the bar to use ecf we can encourage and if necessary cajole the attorneys into agreeing to uh... put the case uh... into electronic filing however uh... it ultimately has to depend to a great extent on the willingness of the attorneys to go along with it and how does one get attorneys to go along with it i came to to trust the system uh... simply through using it or the course of several months uh... and just just putting it through its basis filing different document seeing if it worked i think that the encouragement from the court particularly the judges is probably the most significant factor in getting attorneys and firms uh... comfortable uh... and with using the new electronic filing system we involve the bar from the very beginning in the electronic case filing project we set up a committee of uh... attorneys to help us draft rules and to draft procedures for electronic case filing and i think that went a long way toward uh... making the bar feel that the rules that we had come up with were practical rules i think the rules committee uh... was very successful uh... some of the key issues that were uh... discussed were issues such as uh... the security of the system and uh... the ease of use for attorneys uh... whether uh... uh... attorneys would be able to file uh... documents that would be signed uh... basically how attorneys would satisfy rule eleven requirements getting members of the bar to agree to ecf is one thing getting them to use it is another any project actually changes the way someone comes to you uses a system takes a lot of time and effort in training we got terrific training from the court the on the ground training in the law firm is probably the most important because it gets the attorneys comfortable uh... with the system younger attorneys are automatically comfortable with the system because they grow up utilizing computers good morning my name is everland at regas and this is my colleague darryl mcfadden and we'd like to welcome you to the bankruptcy court and familiar as you with the electronic case filing system i think that maybe extra time needs to be spent with uh... those of us who have practiced longer and are more used to the paper society and are frightened by pressing a button on a computer to affect a legal consequence not like to turn over the overcoming those fears often means one-on-one attention which can become a resource issue for a court currently the way things work in the intake office and as they have three years in the court are that the attorneys come into court uh... into the clerk's office and this ecf training reverses that and we actually go out to the attorneys to train them on their machines with electronic case filing the attorneys are using their computers and therefore it was our conclusion that that's what we need to train them on is their computers hands-on attention though is really important that's very difficult to give it's very labor-intensive for the court it does take more time it takes more time and it's a definite more strain on the clerk's office having an employee out doing this the payoff is and the reduction in the amount of paper the reduction in the phone calls we get in uh... needing documents immediately we hope within this year the reduction in even the technical needs that they experience will be diminished right now in my firm's cleveland office say that approximately ten percent of the litigators are involved in cases in the electronic filing system and i expect that number will probably increase uh... to well over seventy percent of the litigators in the next five years so it's a matter of never being discouraged always uh... conti always marketing it whether it's internally or with the bar and getting out there just getting out there and sitting down with folks one-on-one or in a group environment to demonstrate the system and uh... make ourselves available whenever and however we can as that segment noted c m e c f is a c change for the courts as such there's more than technology to cope with the human side of dealing with change plays a big role court to court visited one of the alpha courts district court for the northern district of california a week and a half prior to its going live with c m e c f chief deputy clerk jim gilmore uses the metaphor of the dinner party to describe the need for flexibility when implementing e c f this is like hosting and preparing dinner for about twenty people we need to have everything sort of come to the table at once so we can sit down begin this feast and it's tricky like a dinner party is just like having to lay the sauce on the stove top thing in the oven isn't done and and you just have to try not to panic when that happens and try not to think in the sauce too much strain the metaphor systems manager doug purcell has a somewhat different way of putting it purcell is also the c m e c f project manager hardest part of it has been just doing the dance to stay on top of all of the pieces that there are tongue-in-cheek purcell says doing that has a price it means that you don't get as much sleep as you used to when you drink more than you did before we're getting twenty five or thirty uh... registration forms a day and and we're getting behind buds been doing them all uh... they can't keep up long he's going to come in on sunday with the dot dot and come in every sunday so you know the start date gets near clerk of court rich weekend and she's deputy clerk gilmore worry about processing the rush of electronic registrations coming in from a turn i don't know how much longer we can do this i mean we got the big flood of them after the recorder and uh... daily journal articles so you know it went up from about two or three a day to twenty five or thirty a day and it's still climbing i don't know what kind of capacity can we handle on a regular basis one person can probably reasonably do a dozen or maybe twenty of these a day uh... if they do it full time of course we don't have anybody who can do it full time right now when they first began to think about what c m e c f would mean the managers quickly realized that all staff needed to participate in the changeover so they held several town hall meetings trying to deliver that the message by this kind of mechanism that we need you to think about what it will mean to because there are things we haven't thought of managing change often is touted as a worthy goal but gilmore says the change management is the least of their problems there's all this talk about it it sounds like it's something that you can manage but you have to make change happen and that's the hardest thing in the courts the organization is not made for change very traditional precedent is all when i first came here in the nineteen seventies one of my first jobs was to clean out a store room it was full of great big heavy glass ink wells and huge jars of shafer ink the people had kept around just in case these typewriter deals didn't work out from ink wells to a paperless system in a digital age some of the pieces can be mysterious it's a tape changing device with a little robot that rums around inside sticking tapes out of a cartridge and sticking them into the drive it took me a little while to get up the nerve to even try to open the door when it first arrived this is backups for the whole of the ecf box the database itself and then all of the other bits and pieces that go to make up the application the hardware is only part of purcell's challenge there's also the software to install leave yourself plenty of time but i also have a lot of faith in the folks at sd sd formerly known as ttsd uh... their documentation is usually very very good and i'm sure that it will be much better when the next wave of course comes on purcell had heard rumors that the software could be installed in two or three days doing it for the first time and doing it off of documentation which is not necessarily in its ultimately polished form takes a whole lot longer than two or three days more like six weeks initially the management team thought the docking staff would be most affected by the change but they discovered that those most affected will be their courtroom deputies because we are wedded to the idea that input happens as close to the source of the document or event as possible they will actually for the first time being first time input data into a system the courtroom deputies expect a year of heartburn with the new responsibilities for docking combined with working through the paper for existing cases but they look forward to the eventual payoff of no more photocopying and serving court orders in the meantime it will work out solutions as problems arise and what about the docket clerks jobs my main concern was if it will affect it as in well i have a job and it won't affect it in that way you know nobody's going to be losing their job but it will affect what we do or and how we do it we are still responsible for the docket but we will not be the people who actually enter things onto the docket that will happen some attorney in kalamazoo so we're still responsible for something that we're not actually doing now that's going to be that's going to require a different way of thinking about what it is what our product is not so much data entry anymore but more quality control and customer service you don't have near as much memorization involved whereas you have to memorize code after code after code before now everything's right there on your screen you just choose so it actually speeds the process up quite a bit and makes it a lot easier to get your work done i think the biggest part is just not knowing what to expect the training kind of gets rid of those fears that you have of the unknown what do we do if it's out of state if it's out of state there's some two selections at the bottom of your list it's been really easy to pick up and so i'm not really too apprehensive about the change over everyone has a bit of resistance to change and you can't avoid that but this is definitely going to be for the passage no question and the court's judges they may tend to postpone or delay really getting involved with the project like this because it seems a little peripheral to their most important sorts of it was decided that in the san francisco court three of the eighteen judges would begin taking e-cases in the san jose division the six active judges will participate and in oakland one judge will take e-filed cases the court began their training with a basic approach get their hands on it let them feel it and then let them decide how much of it they're actually going to do about eighty percent of the court's cases are civil e-c-f will be a big change for the court's outside customers too we did a run on our current docketing system database and discovered that there are eleven thousand attorneys approximately who are parties to cases that are pending now and they're all over the country they're all over the world so we decided let's go ahead and do some type of a web-based tutorial to hopefully get the training out to the attorney so that's why we took a look at uh... the fjcs tutorial to see will that will that meet our needs with a few modifications to the fjc template the tutorial is now a key element of the court's e-c-f website and training for the bar we've gotten some feedback from attorneys who have been using the tutorial and so far the the feedback that we've gotten is that pretty positive they feel that it's fairly easy to use the tutorial despite the notices on the court's website project manager doug purcell says they now realize that they should have advertised the change over to e-c-f sooner and advertised it in print when the court held a news conference two weeks prior to the launch date e-c-f made the front pages of two legal trade papers print is obviously a medium which is still very very significant because there were a whole lot of people all over town who went you're doing what and you're doing it when and only found out then some two weeks in advance of the so-called live date that this was actually going on because it didn't register until it showed up on the front page of a newspaper advertising the old-fashioned media early even if you don't have anything for anybody to look at yet we can recommend documenting and cataloging what a court learns as it moves through the process it helps to inform and your later decision-making and expedites that and minimizes the effort you have to put into where you've been in the past there will be things to do things to fix things to tinker with things to patch policies to change for a year at least one of the things they're going to get back is a thing that says aha you have filed an electro case that you are now an electrophiler the experience of another alpha court shows how courts can deal with the fears that ecf often creates for those in and outside the court the bankruptcy court for the western district of north carolina began its journey into the new system with electronic case management court to court visited the charlotte division several weeks into the process the fears i had about c m e c f coming to this district were that it would not be as reliable as the system that we now have the fears that i had were that it would possibly reduce my kit my workload uh... and if that happened then i might work myself out of the job i guess one of the biggest fears i had was that we would have to greatly uh... modify the way we operate number one that i would break the machine number two that everything i put in would disappear and number three that i wouldn't even be able to understand it the system that i had grown accustomed to for the many years i've been here i knew it would become extinct uh... so i would have to learn a whole new system again i think my first reaction was the same as everyone else's fear and resistance to change so why would a court volunteer to put itself through this sooner rather than later our belief is that c m e c f is absolutely essential for us to be able to keep up with the caseload that we've got the court considers seven thousand cases a year the numbers keep going up and the court knows that the new technology will help manage this ever increasing caseload but with its shared location in an historic building the bankruptcy court has another urgent albeit low-tech reason to convert to c m e c f all the records there they're really a mess we have no space we have absolutely no space in the basement there's no case probably closed in and on our shelves any longer than four months we're probably shipping archives at least a hundred boxes every four months or less more important though it's it provides uh... a great enhancement to our service to the people who use the court we file hundreds of documents a day i'm a chapter thirteen trustee and in a location that's remote from charlotte so i can't just get my car and drive down the block and go to the clerk's office so the ability to file remotely is greatly appreciated we will be able to docket and file documents in an efficient manner and that we will be able to run reports that are useful to our office i think it will be wonderful i think we can take a laptop computer and literally have our whole office at our fingertips most alpha courts agree that the preparation prior to going live is critical but there's no standard version of how to prepare each court follows its own style a key factor for the western district of north carolina bankruptcy court is the self-directed team management of the staff almost everybody in my court's involved in the program from day one we had a number of committees you know the training committee the dictionary committee and the publicity and everybody chose a committee that they wanted to be on it got everybody involved in i think it made the transition easier and it got people excited to get into the system we jumped in with both feet just like the staff did we did the same training exercises robin chirka's a case administrator in the ashfield division became one of the court's trainers again the great thing about it in case flags is it's versatile you can add a flag at the same time you're removing a flag the top box is going to enable you to set a flag she emphasizes showing people how cm ecf will benefit them directly once they have an incentive then you're going to overcome that fear by replacing it with training knowledge and information how would that help you or assist you in the administration in a day-to-day uh... situation it would help us by getting the cases closed and discharge in a timely manner it would also help identify if we need to docket a receipt we've been through tremendous amounts of training thus far so that has kind of gotten me used to the new system and some of the fears have subsided the terrific thing about it in case data is now you're actually editing information that's in the system as opposed to making a notation on the docket courtroom deputy shon licey from the ashfield division is also responsible for docketing she had feared that cm ecf would put her out of a job and as the attorneys are using our system more and more then i will be doing less inputting and more reviewing but i will review everything that they input so actually the workload will not go down it will only change training does overcome fears but training has its own challenges i would say the biggest challenge to staff training is the period of time that takes place between when structure train stops and when going live begins what i call the reinforcement period you have to make sure that those skills are continually reinforced so that the staff maintains a high confidence level and in a comfort level with the system in our core we've met that challenge by preparing weekly exercises for the staff in a particular topic area that we felt could use some reinforcement your check indication want to be sure and check to make sure that a county is shown when you're performing your data quality assurance the court went live with the case management part of cm ecf on march fifth it delayed the electronic filing part of the system and so has begun to train outside users only recently we wanted to know the system very well before we went out to start training others your filing date you you never can mess with that because it's always going to be today's date so whenever you go to enter in this petition at your office it's not going to be entered until the date that you actually enter it you'll never be able to change that date case administrator lucrecia sullivan also volunteered to be a trainer she says comfort and familiarity are key factors in training users from outside the court number one we want to make the training as painless as possible we want it to be smooth your country your phone fax and email or all optional information if you choose to put that in then that's your decision but where it's not required for cm ecf sullivan who also trains court staff says she taught herself a great deal about cm ecf by repeatedly working in the training database whenever she had the opportunity i was docking emotions opening cases once i started training i was forever learning uh... every class that we taught there was always something something new that i would learn the trainers have spent a great deal of time and they they have the ability to translate their training into layman's terms i know very little about computers but they can speak my language so what we want to do is we want to review this information before we submit the transaction and this is a habit that you definitely need to get into when you start doing cm ecf in march when the court switched from band cap to electronic case management judge hudges asked that no paper files ever again be brought into his courtroom main reason i told the clerk that we didn't want more files in the courtroom was because i wanted to be a hero of the clerk's office it's easy to understand why the week before court i would start pulling files off the shelves and making sure that each document that the judge might need to review was tagged for the judge's review and i had to make sure that those documents and files were in order in the order that the cases would be called on the docket i no longer have to do any of that case number one forty four jay craig wittley hearing on motion for relief and stay of city national bank debtor's response as licey calls up each file it's immediately available on judge hudges screen court to court was there on a chapter thirteen motion day by lunchtime judge hudges had heard more than one hundred and twenty motions and we have not had a file in the courtroom during that whole process cmecf has had all those files there available to me what's remarkable is that the court has had a thirty three percent increase in new cases during the first three months of electronic case management as much to do after going live says the court's ecf coordinator karen hevner keep everyone informed internally and externally as much as possible continue to have regular committee meetings to be sure everyone's on task and train train train and you can go back to your docket report click on the reports hypertext link and choose docket report and don't be too proud to ask for help there's probably another court out there who has already experienced what you're going through and probably already has a solution or work around now once you submit it you're going to get a notice of electronic filing verification screen we hope you found these segments helpful please go to the fjc website at the address on the screen print out an evaluation form and fax it to us at two zero two five zero two court to court will continue to follow the implementation of cmecf and bring you more information from the courts themselves