Court Reduces Fees

On July 27th, 2010, Art Ritchie, Chief Judge of the Eighth Judicial District Court announced that the service fees associated with mandatory electronic filing will be reduced. Fees associated with each filing will be reduced by more than 40% from $6 to $3.50 by September, 2010. "Our justice partners, attorneys, and unrepresented litigants have expressed satisfaction with the electronic filing process, but they have expressed concerns about the cost of filing and serving papers and pleadings with the District Court," stated Judge Ritchie. "We expect that the court's decision to reduce the charge for e-filing will have an immediate positive impact on the users, improve access to justice, and mitigate the cost of court business."

In February of this year, the Eighth Judicial District Court implemented mandatory e-filing for all civil cases in an effort to manage increasing workloads with reduced staff, free up space for additional judges, and eliminate the growing concern for future storage of paper files. The court's long standing agreement with its e-filing technology partner, Tyler Technologies E-file and Serve(formerly Wiznet), requires a service fee for each filing and a subscription fee for the filing application. According to Steve Grierson, the Court's Executive Officer, the original costs were set when the court was filing approximately fifteen percent of its court documents through electronic filing. "We have accepted 309,985 submissions in five months since the inception of mandatory e-filing and are on track to accept close to one million submissions in one year", reported Grierson. "To put that into perspective, we accepted 410,015 submissions in the previous seven years."