Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Electronic Filing: What Is It? What Are Its Implications?

2003; Routledge; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

0882-3383

William A. Fenwick, Robert D. Brownstone,

Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies

I. INTRODUCTION A. Dramatic Impact of E-filing A study, titled How Much Information, published in 2000 by the faculty and students at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, (1) reported: The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage. (2) It is at first startling to read that only .003% of the unique information produced annually by the world is in printed documents. Startling or not, the statistic provides a perspective on the amount of information that currently exist only in electronic form. It also raises the serious question of why are we only now beginning to hear about electronic filing? B. What is E-filing? Electronic filing (hereinafter e-filing) is the filing of information in electronic form, as opposed to paper form. E-filing will likely have a more pervasive effect on the legal system than did the adoption of administrative procedure acts or codes of civil procedure. It will require fundamental changes in organization, operation, management, and resource utilization by courts, lawyers, clients, citizens, and government entities. Before analyzing the basis for such a sweeping statement, it is proper to begin at a common starting point. Traditionally, filings in courts and government agencies have been in paper form. (3) Official court record systems have traditionally been paper-based. (4) Government agency records have also been predominantly paper-based. (5) As would be expected, law office record systems are also paper-based. A significant limitation of paper-based records is that they reside in a single location, which means no more than one person can simultaneously access the records. In courts, a unique case number is usually assigned to each proceeding. (6) In the authors' experience, typically each court establishes a system of file organization so that, if filings in a case are delivered to the right court, properly identified, accurately and re-filed, one can theoretically locate any document in any filing at any time. Unfortunately, when files are stored in a variety of facilities, processed by different clerks, reviewed by different judicial officials, transported to various locations, and re-filed many times, it is not surprising that a particular filed document can sometimes not be located. Government agencies that receive filings from the public have filing systems that are slightly more complicated than court system files. It is not unusual for an agency to have files related to a member of the public scattered among two or more offices. (7) In addition, files in government agencies also have a more varied organization. (8) Yet, access is still location-dependent, which means records can only be viewed by one user at a time. Prior to implementing e-filing, some courts and government agencies, using information from the original paper records, have created a variety of electronic information systems to assist in locating and using information in the original paper records. The extent, use, and capabilities of these electronic systems are tremendously varied. On the low-tech end of the spectrum, the use is simply printing paper schedules, such as court calendars, or creating electronic images of paper records, and then manipulating those images in much the same way pages of paper are manipulated. …