Why Not a Paperless Court System

Faced with cutting the budget everyone is looking at ways to save money. The court system here in New Mexico has been asked to cut its budget by 2 ½ percent this year. If you have every seen a case file from one of the court systems you know that it is single sided pages and the files are very thick even for one case history. Perhaps the answer to the problem is to turn to electronic documents that can be sent to the court through email or hand delivered to the court on a jump drive device depending on the need for security. Think of all of the paper this would save along with all of the trees that could be saved. Electronic signatures are not unheard of in our day and age so the judges could have them ready for the signing of any legal document. Official court stamps could also be changed over to electronic stamps that could then be used by court staff. All of the Administrative staff at the courts are well versed in the use of computers so think how much easier it would be to retrieve documents for both lawyers and defendants if all the staff had to do was retrieve the case files from a data base. The court system could then charge a larger fee for any document that was required to be printed out for a case. This would discourage the waste of court time and paper. This would also help meet ADA requirement for sight impaired defendants since an electronic document can be enlarge or read by a computer program. A good number of the court documents have already been turned into electronic documents and are already on the court websites in this state. If putting records on computer systems in the medical field will save large amounts of money in this state why not do the same for the court system and save the money to pay Judges and court staff salaries. Just think how much less storage would be required for electronic files. I get the feeling that lawyers in this state would also not be averse to changing over to electronic document since they could bring along a laptop and make any last minute changes for the judges in their office with little trouble. The only programs that would be required for the format are Microsoft word and adobe professional to turn the finished document into a PDF file so that no further changes could be made once it was signed by a judge. These systems also provide a dating system for a history of any changes made to legal documents and a password if the judge should wishes to restrict access to the document for future use. The court system could also require that all future documents be printed out double sided so as to save paper.