The Clarendon County Clerk of Court's Office is about to handle a lot less paperwork.
That doesn't mean that attorneys and judges will be filing less of it; they will just be doing it a different way.
The South Carolina Supreme Court is calling for electronic filing of civil and criminal cases in the state's circuit courts, and Clarendon County has been chosen as one of the first locations for the effort.
"This means that records will be online, but you will be able to look at civil records only at this time," said Clerk of Court Beulah Roberts. "Attorneys and judges will file documents without coming into the office, or mailing documents to the office."
Chief Justice Jean Toal will hold a mandatory e-filing kick-off meeting at 10 a.m. Nov. 12 for all attorneys, paralegals and administrative staff in Clarendon and Williamsburg counties who file in common pleas court in the 3rd Judicial Circuit.
Topics at the meeting, which is not open to the public at-large, will include an introduction to e-filing; the S.C. Judicial Department E-filing Portal Page; training for E-filing in common pleas, with videos explaining how to e-file, and 23 attorney reference guides that can be downloaded or printed; and the outline of the e-filing implementation timeline for the 3rd Circuit.
According to a flyer from the state Judicial Department, e-filing will go live Dec. 9 in Clarendon County. It will follow Jan. 19, 2016, in Sumter and Lee counties, and Feb. 8, 2016, in Williamsburg County.
Toal said e-filing guidelines were approved by the state's highest court Aug. 5 of this year. Those guidelines will also be included in the Nov. 12 mandatory meeting.
"The training will be for Clerk of Court staff, attorneys and their assistants, judges, judges' law clerks and judges' administrative assistants," Roberts noted.
"Clarendon County was chosen as one of the pilot counties," Roberts added. "The other counties in the 3rd Circuit, of which Clarendon is a member, have been added in the last month because attorneys in this circuit file cases in Clarendon."
Roberts said the other county joining Clarendon in the initial e-filing adventure is Greenville County.
"I feel like we are ahead of the curve, because I could have said no, that I have too much on my plate," Roberts said. "But I couldn't miss out on Clarendon County being first in the state on something so wonderful and new."
It's especially wonderful for Roberts' office, which gets an "astonishing" amount of mail each day.
"It would surprise you to see the amount of mail we receive some days, even though we are small compared to other larger counties," Roberts said. "This will reduce the amount of paperwork that we receive each day, and will definitely cut down on the amount of filing we have to do every day and the copies we have to mail back to attorneys."
Toal said in her annual address to the General Assembly in 2013 that the state has used $45 million in federal grants since 2010 to create the "E-court" and make sure it has both a high level of efficiency and cyber security. She said the system will cost about $7 million per year to maintain and upgrade, adding that about 160,000 cases are filed on average annually in civil and family courts.
The money to pay for the system, Toal noted, will come from modest filing fees for civil cases, along with small fees from each of South Carolina's 46 counties.
