Instant access to court filings in the works.

Judges and court case managers may soon have instant access to court filings anywhere in the state and lawyers could receive similar access in about a year.

The Florida Court Technology Commission got a preview of the latest update to the state's Comprehensive Case Information System (CCIS), which collects data from court cases around the state. Currently, that information is available to approximately 32,000 public employees in various governmental agencies, including the state Department of Children and Families, the Department of Corrections, the Department of Juvenile Justice, state attorneys, public defenders, and others.

Melvin Cox, IT director for the Florida Court Clerks & Comptrollers, and Seventh Circuit Judge Terrence Perkins, chair of the FCTC's CCIS Subcommittee, updated commission members on coming improvements to the case data system.

One improvement, Cox said, is linking CCIS to county clerk of court case management systems. That means when a case is filed, "as soon as the case management system is updated, it goes up to CCIS in real time. It's instantaneous all day long for thousands and hundreds of thousands of cases."

Before the upgrade, new case information was sent to Tallahassee and updated daily.

The related improvement, in what Judge Perkins called "CCIS Version 3.0," will be expanding to judges and case managers the ability to do statewide searches based on a person's or case's name.

That can be invaluable, Perkins said, to case managers or judges who are trying to find out all cases pertaining to a party in the unified family courts or in criminal court.

"Why limit ourselves to a county or circuit [when searching for cases] when we don't have to?" Perkins said. "It would allow us to locate the related parties in any case, regardless of division."

Cox explained that case managers and judges can do searches on CCIS now, but it can be an involved process requiring lots of their time and input.

"What we want to do is come up with a tool that will automate all of those manual steps," he said after the meeting.

Users would have a number of factors they could use to refine the search, and could limit it, for example, to all family law or criminal cases, Perkins said.

First to be able to use the system, he said, "is the clerk or the case manager. Right now, that [related case search] is being done manually. We want to automate that process for the clerk. The second part of it is then how do we display this information so...