Employing e-service before e-filing would be exasperating: PDs don't oppose e-service; they just think e-filing should come first.

A proposed rule mandating attorneys exchange court documents by email rather than paper was debated before the Supreme Court in June, with public defenders and others asserting the rule not apply to criminal cases until mandatory electronic filing is implemented.

Proponents of Rule 2.516 argue that the changes required simply aren't great enough to warrant an exception that could delay further technological advancement in the courts.

"Email service can be implemented with very little, if any, substantial change in capital expenditures, in training, or in anything else," said Paul Regensdorf, a member of the Rules of Judicial Administration Committee and the Florida Courts Technology Commission.

"Respectfully, email service, as it's presently proposed, is not a 'new' system. I think the vast majority of even small practitioners and public defenders--based on my talking with public defenders around the state--have and use email and computers substantially in their practice, if not exclusively....

"It's taking email that they use every day, and computers that they use to generate the forms they say they generate every day, and simply not dumping them onto extra paper to send to the state attorneys."

But the e-service system itself isn't the problem, said 11th Circuit Assistant Public Defender John Morrison, representing the Florida Public Defender Association.

"The FPDA does not oppose e-filing," said Morrison. "We're wildly looking forward to the day that happens. What we oppose is the tail wagging the dog: e-service coming before e-filing."

Morrison added that public defenders are often the last to know about technological advances. Morrison's own offices in MiamiDade still utilize what he described as "1983 technology," which could make the e-service changes more costly than Regensdorf and other rule supporters realize.

"I'm not certain ... whether there is any circuit in the state that is ready to do e-filing in criminal cases," said Morrison.

That's due to the large volume of cases public defenders and state attorneys see every year. Each case--800,000 a year for public defenders, over a million for state attorneys--results in a multitude of paperwork.

"It seems so simple. You print off a document, why can't you just email it to the state? And it is when it's a document," said Morrison. "It's when you start thinking about the total volume, the batching, we just have to do this by huge batches, and that requires big computer systems, and...