Death of CCMS Leaves
Technology Vacuum
By Jon Streeter
President, State Bar of California
On March 27th, after an
all-day hearing, the Judicial Council made a difficult but ultimately necessary
decision to abandon any further work on the California Case Management System
(CCMS). That was the wise and prudent thing to do, given the level of political
controversy surrounding CCMS, but in my view the issue of statewide automation
within the court system will not go away. Ultimately, the issue will have to be
dealt with in some form.
Court administration, like law itself,
is anchored in what has been done in the past. Anyone who has actually gone to a
clerk’s office in one of our county courts within the last few years can
see clear evidence of this. These offices bear all the hallmarks of business
environments from decades ago. Everything revolves around the flow of paper,
from the old-style method of intake – complete with that familiar thumping
sound made by mechanical file stamps – to the carts that are used to
deliver paper from place to place, to the mode of handling confidential records
in sealed envelopes (whose seal may or may not remain secure), to the need for
and the complexities of managing physical storage space.
During discussions about court funding,
Legislators often ask – properly so – what the judicial branch has
done to find efficiencies in its operations. Automation would eliminate many of
the "back-office" inefficiencies that have always plagued our systems
of manual intake, central filing and hand-distribution to the chambers of
assigned judges. Those of us in the trenches who are fighting for improved
funding for the judiciary know full well that unless the branch somehow finds
the discipline to root out these inefficiencies, the current crisis in court
funding can never be effectively resolved and will just continue recurring in
down economic times.
The heart of the issue here, though, is
not money but uniform access to justice for our citizens statewide. CCMS is a
system that would finally have done away with the vestiges of balkanization in
our courts. Over the last few decades, the California court system has evolved
from one in which we had 58 totally separate court systems, each with its own
idiosyncratic rules and regulations – page limitations on briefs, size of
pleadings and fonts, deadlines for filing, number of copies required, hours of operation
for clerks' offices – to one that is, in the main, standardized across
the state. E-filing is the last frontier in our quest to achieve uniform
standards of justice statewide.
Unfortunately, the aspiration that we
should have uniform standards of justice statewide has never been fully
accepted in a few areas of the state. Some counties – particularly the
large ones, with enough sheer mileage in their highway systems to generate
plenty of county-based support for their courts – have plenty of
resources to fend for themselves. These counties can and will buy their own
automation systems (or add to the ones they have already) and, naturally, they
have little interest in what happens elsewhere.
A much underappreciated aspect of CCMS
would have been dramatically improved transparency. Some of the sharpest
critics of CCMS, of course, came from some judges who complained that “we
do not want this system,” as if they have some kind of proprietary stake
in the judicial system that is superior to that of the citizens who use the
courts. For these judges, the emphasis has often been on the autonomy of
county courts. But what is often left unsaid when the subject of autonomy comes
up is that CCMS would have brought a level of transparency – and with it
accountability – that these judges have never had.
In all of the din surrounding the
controversial price tag for CCMS, few people seemed to appreciate that in
return for its large investment, the judicial branch would save $300 million
per year. I've been visiting many counties around the state this year and the
vast majority of the lawyers I've talked to "get it" on this basic
point. They see the value of statewide e-filing to their practices and most
importantly to their clients, and many make the obvious point that
"sometimes you have to spend money to save money."
The sad irony is that the incremental
impact of killing CCMS, in sheer dollar terms, will achieve a modest savings
next year (around $13 million), which will hardly put a dent in the massive
shortfall we will experience next year if the "triggers" built
into this year's budget are activated (which will in turn trigger equally
massive layoffs). Labor fought hard against CCMS out of understandable concern
about job losses, but in the end the best protection against job losses is in
improved court funding overall. CCMS is a side issue to that much larger
problem.
For some observers, the end of CCMS, and
with it the abandonment of hundreds of millions already invested to develop the
system, is a cause for celebration. But any celebration will be short-lived.
The decades-long drive for uniform standards of justice statewide will
continue. The public's right to access to twenty-first century justice
cannot be denied. And those of us fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with labor to
ensure better funding for the courts will ultimately win the argument that the
best route to job security for court workers is to protect against further
debilitating cuts, not to cannibalize the future health of the branch.