One of the topics we frequently cover in this blog is the digitization of records. There are plenty of instances of land records moving toward online access as these decisions are often made at the county level and the United States has over 3,000 counties.
Court records, however, are often governed by the state so there is much more consistency of approach amongst counties. North Carolina is one state currently amidst an overhaul of their court records. The state is moving each of its 100 counties from paper to Tyler Technologies’ Enterprise Justice Software.
Rather than implementing this change all at once, the courts divided up the state into seven groups. This month, the state of North Carolina courts announced a go-live date for the fourth county cluster out of six, of April 29, 2024. The two remaining county groups will go-live in the summer and fall of this year and the final set of counties will go-live in 2025.
The big benefits that the state will see from this switch include greater access, transparency, and efficiency. The state is also experiencing positive byproducts, like more than two million fewer pages printed in the first ten months of implementation.
Access, of course, needs to be balanced with privacy, which is why it’s so important to those filing court documents to be aware of any personally identifiable information (PII) within them. There are some counties that set up workflows to review all filed documents for sensitive information like a social security number or birthdate, but it’s usually the filer that has ultimate responsibility for what is in their documents.
The good news is that transformative projects like this are the perfect opportunity to identify and redact information in files. Once documents are scanned into a digital format, they can be scoured for PII at scale. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software converts these images into computer-readable type for software to identify sensitive information. While software can easily be used to redact specific areas on forms, modern redaction software is smart enough to be able to read documents like a human would, identifying clues that point to sensitive information, so it doesn’t matter if each document looks different.
As North Carolina moves toward a fully digital court records system, the state is also using the opportunity to integrate with other local and state agencies like law enforcement, a natural fit. Filing and searching capabilities make North Carolina’s eCourts site a more powerful tool than counties could run on their own. As more states move their records into a digital infrastructure, productivity increases for both the government and its constituents.
