Missouri gives on-receipt access to new court filings

CLAYTON, Mo. (CN) — In a big step forward for public access, St. Louis County Court on Friday installed new software that automatically makes court filings public as soon they are received.

The new filing system marks a return in electronic form to the immediate public access that was common throughout the country in the days of paper records.

Friday’s rollout, handled by the tech staff of Missouri’s judiciary, is part of a series of public access reforms following the accession of Chief Justice Mary Russell last year. In response to an inquiry, her office directed Courthouse News to commentary she gave roughly two weeks ago.

“We know it is not enough to say that justice is being done,” said Russell. “The public must see first-hand it is being done before they will begin to believe it is being done.”

Before the arrival of e-filing over the internet, new cases — which are regularly reviewed by the press — would arrive at the court clerk’s office in paper form. In St. Louis City, for example, this reporter and others would get the latest filings directly from the cashier’s window and would review them on a table in the cashier’s lobby.

In St. Louis County, runners brought the new cases up from the first floor to the docketing area on the fifth floor where an employee named Brandy kept a box with the new cases for public review.

But when Missouri moved to electronic filing roughly ten years, that traditional access was lost as court officials withheld access from the press and public. Press and public were required to wait until the pleadings were clerically processed, work that stacked up and delayed access for periods that ran from one day to two weeks.

The delay caused the news in the new cases to grow stale and spurred a federal complaint by Courthouse News against Missouri court administrators.

Last year’s settlement of that litigation ended a three-year First Amendment battle that reached the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the panel of judges ruled in favor of Courthouse News. During oral argument, Eighth Circuit Judge Bobby Shepherd described from the bench the old systems of public access.

“There was a time when — and some in this room may remember it — when you took a pleading to the courthouse and the clerk stamped it physically and it went into different bins and it was available immediately,” he said.

Friday’s implementation of the “Auto Create Case” feature on Casenet, Missouri’s case information portal, brings to electronic filings the same immediate access that prevailed a decade ago when access came through wooden bins holding new paper cases.

In her recent address, Missouri Chief Justice Russell provided statistics showing how effective the Casenet system has been in giving access to the courts. “Our most popular online tool the public can use, for free and without having to travel to a courthouse, is Case.net,” she said. “It provides access to more than 28 million public case records and has had more than 2.1 billion hits to date.”

This is the second of Russell’s reforms, the first of which took place last year when remote access to Casenet was opened up to the press and public, following many years in which remote access was restricted to lawyers who were members of the Missouri bar.

This reporter, who has covered the courts for Courthouse News for more than 19 years, has seen firsthand how Russell’s reforms have helped with transparency and access. The move to giving the public remote access transformed public and press access by allowing reporters to thoroughly report on newsworthy cases throughout Missouri.

The new Casenet software now makes that reporting very timely.

It requires nothing new or different from attorneys filing cases in St. Louis County. The difference is on the side of the court where once a case is submitted, the filing system automatically creates a new case, accepts the lawyer’s petition and assigns a permanent case number.

This form of e-filing, generally called “auto-acceptance,” is widespread in the nation’s federal courts.

The initial rollout of the auto-accept method in Missouri, which was developed from scratch by the judiciary’s IT staff, is limited to breach of contract cases filed in St. Louis County. But other types of civil cases will be added in phases on Oct. 25, Nov. 1 and Nov. 8, and the other county courts will follow.

The reforms undertaken under the auspices of Missouri’s Supreme Court have in recent years been gathering momentum throughout the country. They follow a string of First Amendment victories by Courthouse News in Texas, California, New York, Virginia, Vermont, Ohio and most recently in Idaho.

In addition, a number of states are already providing the same access on receipt in Utah, Arizona, Hawaii, Iowa and New Mexico. However, Courthouse News is still engaged in litigation with court officials in Texas, Virginia, Vermont, Ohio, North Carolina and Minnesota.

Giving an intellectual umbrella to the series of reforms her office has undertaken, Russell said, “We want Missourians to feel like their state courts are relevant in their daily lives.”

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