Clerks centralize access to online records.

Attorneys, as well as all Floridians, will soon be able to access documents from any court case from any county through a single internet access point under a new program being rolled out by the clerks of courts.

The Florida Bar Board of Governors got a preview of the system at its recent May meeting from Lee County Clerk of Court Linda Doggett and Melvin Cox, IT director for the Florida Court Clerks & Comptrollers, which is developing the new system.

Board member Laird Lile, who also serves on the Florida Court Technology Commission, introduced Doggett and Cox and talked about the new project, which he likened to a reverse e-filing system. E-filing is done through a single, statewide internet portal.

Clerks, under an FCTC-supervised plan, are in the process of putting their court records online, but each county has its own system.

"You are all familiar with the e-portal, and the e-portal is a great step in the advancement in the way we file documents," Lile said. "That's only for getting the document into the court system. The portal doesn't let us look at what's in the court file. Right now to look at the court file, we get to go to whichever county it's in and figure out how to get into that county's particular website. That's not as efficient as it could be.

"What the clerks have now is a system they would like to demonstrate for us that will have that single point of viewing, just like now we have the single point of filing."

Doggett said the project uses the existing comprehensive case information system (CCIS), which is currently used by about 30,000 government employees who need access to court data.

She said clerks realized it is frustrating for attorneys to have to visit different websites for each clerk and deal with different methods of accessing, viewing, and formatting documents.

Doggett, who chairs the FCCC's CCIS committee, said the organization obtained a grant, performed strategic planning, and devised a new way for electronic access by upgrading the existing CCIS program.

"The comprehensive case information system has been around for many years.... It is a database of all of the cases filed in Florida," she said. The new system "will take and upload data from each clerk's office in real time. When something is e-filed from your office, it will go to your clerk's office, which will do their processing, but at the same time that information is going to the state [CCIS] database, and our customers will be able not only to...

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