The Leflore County Circuit Clerk's Office has gone online, offering access to civil lawsuit documents, judgment rolls and soon marriage licenses through a public records Web site.
Now, judges, lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants or anyone who's interested in a lawsuit can view it and print a copy without stepping foot in the courthouse.
The simple procedure will eliminate some lengthy trips for attorneys, said Deputy Circuit Clerk April Holliman, who has to locate files and make copies when requested. The Web site also will save time for Circuit Clerk Trey Evans' staff, she said.
"It could save several hours at a time. I've got an attorney coming from Jackson this afternoon for a file that will probably take him two to three hours to copy."
In the future, all the attorney will have to do is pull up the site www.recordsusa.com, click on Mississippi and then again on Leflore County. The site run by Hattiesburg-based Heritage Solutions provides electronic records storage for counties nationwide.
A log-in box will ask for identification. The temporary password information is:
- Company I.D. - Lefloreco.
A case can then be searched by plaintiff's name, defendant's name or file number.
For the time being, the service is free. Once the program is fine-tuned to fit the office's needs, the files will be available on a subscription basis, costing attorneys and others outside the courthouse $1 per copy, said Circuit Clerk Trey Evans. The money will go to the server for site maintenance.
Evans said the new service follows the spirit of the state open records law, and he hopes it also will clean up some of the clutter in his office.
Six shipping boxes were stacked on the floor behind the front desk Tuesday. Each of them contained its own lawsuit, each more than 1,000 pages that will have to be processed, scanned into the computer and packed away in filing drawers.
"I hope to get to the point where we have suits like that come to us through a CD, and entire filings will be paperless," Evans said.
Posting the documents on the Internet is one step in a process to shrink all court filing into cyberspace.
The office has accumulated years upon years of records, and the paperwork is piling up at an even greater rate now. That's because of the increase of mass tort cases, which bring with them mountains of documents. The only way for circuit clerks to avoid drowning in paperwork is to eliminate the physical presence of these giant lawsuits, Evans said.
"This is something that larger jurisdictions throughout the country have gotten. They've gone to e-filing just because of the swamp of paperwork."
For the most part, Evans said, that conversion has happened free of charge for circuit clerk's offices and the taxpayers who support them. Recent circuit court orders in Mississippi require attorneys submitting lawsuits to pay a filing fee for each plaintiff involved. The charge in Leflore County is $95 per plaintiff.
When applied to mass tort claims, those fees can rake in a fortune for the county hosting such a suit, said Evans.
"That has generated for some counties a tremendous amount of money," he said. "There are some counties like Holmes County and Claiborne down south with thousands of plaintiffs. So you have counties that ended last year with about $200,000 in case fees."
Leflore County had about 100 more circuit court civil lawsuits last year than in 2001, many of them mass tort cases, Evans said. The revenue that those big lawsuits have generated is being invested in the software that is allowing Evans to load them onto the Internet.
"The court system is overworked, the clerk's offices especially with all the filing, but the attorneys along the way are the ones who have covered the expenses for us to get where we are now," Evans explained. "This hasn't cost the taxpayers of Leflore County anything."
Once all the files are scanned into the computer, the county won't have to pay to preserve them on microfilm and microfiche either. They will be stored on a database in Hattiesburg.
Currently, all docket information on each case is available on the Web site. Evans' staff is still in the process of imaging the actual complaints and other documents, an unwieldy task for which he is running a night shift too.
