E-filing becomes mandatory for civil matters in Texas courts on July 1, 2016. Are you ready?
During its 19 month life, the Pony Express was the fastest way to move information from coast to coast. Leaving from St. Joseph, MO or from Sacramento, CA; the relays of riders could make the 2,000 mile trip in 9 to 12 days.
Couriers are important. Wells Fargo began as a courier service, transporting packages and gold (remember all those stagecoach robberies in those old Westerns?).
Technology in the form of the Pacific Telegraph line ended the need for the Pony Express.
Why am I talking about this?
Couriers on bicycles or vehicles are the direct (though decidedly less romantic) descendants of The Pony Express and Wells Fargo. If you’re still using couriers to move physical (paper) case files and documents from your office to the client to the courthouse, you aren’t using a pony, but you’re still using 19th century methods in the 21st century.
You can do better. And, in Texas, you’ll have to do better as e-filing becomes mandatory state-wide this July. (The official website for e-filing in Texas is http://www.efiletexas.gov.)
Costs – Dollars and Time
Constantly having to schedule courier service is a drain on your time throughout the day. While you may have your courier service on speed dial for one-touch dialing; one-click (OK, it’ll take more than that) e-filing is a simpler and faster process.
Costs vary, but paying a weekly or monthly invoice for courier services will add up. If you take advantage of document management software productivity – and use your copiers as the beginning of an automated document process – you’ll add to your bottom line.
Document Management Can Help
That “e” in e-filing is short for, of course, “electronic.” Digital document management software brings more advantages to your company than the ability to share them digitally:
- Save space – digital files take up less space than filing cabinets
- Ability to find documents fast – 20% time savings based on filing and retrieval efficiency (Laserfiche)
- Collaboration – be sure you’re always working on the right version of a document, on your own or as a team.
There are many benefits of document management, discover telling statistics in my post, The Document Management Decision – The Stats That Say Just Do It.
Also, you can read all of our posts related to document management here.
E-Filing Works
Tyler Technologies developed and deployed the Texas system. In an article in Legaltech News, the system is intended to be an electronic “front door” to the court. In the first year of use, the system eliminated nearly 27 million pages of paper.
In its first year of operation, eFileTexas handled 3.2 million transactions with a 99.77% uptime. The system has five petabytes of storage and has 1,800 servers in both Texas and Maine to ensure redundancy and scalability.
Now, we aren’t lawyers ourselves and I’m sure it’s not quite as simple as the marketing would have you believe – in any huge implementation such as this there will be a few glitches. That said, in the long run, e-filling will boost productivity in legal offices throughout Texas.
I’m not suggesting that you’ll never need to print or use a courier service again (couriers serve a critical function in our just-in-time society), but that for the majority of your cases it’s time for e-filing.
Be sure to look into DocCare, our planning to implementation document management services. Click here to learn more about DocCare
