Board OKs Court Computer System

Attorneys across the county will eventually be able to file lawsuits in Orange County Superior Court without leaving their offices, and citizens will be able to visit their local library to scan divorce, probate and other public legal records.

The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to purchase $1.99 million worth of technology that will make those advances possible in the next six years, a move the court’s presiding judge said would “allow the court to move into the 21st Century.”

The computer hardware and software, which will be purchased from Unisys Corp., will also help the court improve its efficiency in a variety of areas, from simplifying legal research to expanding word processing and electronic mail capabilities, officials said.

Most of all, court executive officer Alan Slater said, the system will help the courts move toward a computer age where paperwork is phased out.

“We want the court to have a system where paper is produced on demand, not where it’s a paper-based system,” Slater said.

The new system will allow judges in the next year to access legal journals stored on compact discs, eliminating the need for many costly subscriptions, court information systems manager Dick Droll said. Instead of several dozen subscriptions to the same publication, one disc can be bought and plugged into a network where it can be read by all judges.

Within six years, county residents will be able to walk up to a computer keyboard in public and law libraries and call up copies of legal documents, Droll said.

A pilot program, with a terminal that will let the public print out their own copies of documents, will be available in the Family Law Court in Orange within a year, Droll said.

The new system will also cut down the amount of data entry needed, Droll said.

For instance, the district attorney’s office files the most cases in Superior Court. All of those cases are drafted by prosecutors on computers, printed out on paper, and sent to the court where an employee will type the text into the court’s computer.

The new system, Droll said, will allow computers in the district attorney’s office to “talk” to the court’s computers, enabling prosecutors to file cases directly from their office. That advance, which will be available in a few months, will be expanded to include private attorneys in their offices within six years, Droll said.

Superior Court Judge Theodore E. Millard, chair of the court’s technology committee, said the challenges facing the court’s push to become more accessible are the lack of money during tight budget times and the type of equipment put into place in the 1980s.

The court currently has a mainframe system, a setup in which terminals throughout the courthouse feed into a central, in-house computer. While Millard said the mainframe “seemed like the right thing to do” when it was selected, the advent in the past few years of small, powerful, desktop computers has forced the court to change gears.