Rhode Island Family Courts are Moving to an E-Filing System!
December 27, 2013
Authored By: Christopher Pearsall, RI Divorce Attorney
a.k.a. " The Rhode Island Divorce Coach ℠ "
By October of 2014 the Rhode Island Family Court's expect to move to a new CMS system called "Odyssey" and an e-filing system called "File & Serve."
This is a huge endeavor for the courts and hopefully the benefits will be just as great for the court's efficiency and accessibility both for attorneys and for the public. At present the expected date for the systems to be online and implemented in the Rhode Island Family Courts is October of 2014.
Continuing legal education classes will be offered for attorneys some of which may involve credit for the education. Instruction will be provided online both for lawyers and for the general public.
Court staff are already being trained in the new systems in the Worker's Compensation Court which is the first court that will come online with this new system on or about March of 2014.
The systems will enable the filing of new cases anywhere there is internet access at any time of day from any place in the world. According to the President of the Rhode Island Bar Association, Attorney J. Robert Weisberger, Jr. in the January/February 2014 Edition of the Rhode Island Bar Journal there will also be a public portal that will provide users with greater access to the court files.
According to Attorney Weisberger the systems will allow individual document scanning or batch scanning using bar-coded instructions to route the filings to appropriate work queues.
The courts will each be changing their procedural rules to account for the filing in each of their various courts as they see fit so the implementation will be most effective for each court based upon their systems currently in effect.
The Rhode Island Court System will be entering a new era of technology. As with any technological progress there may be more questions as the system progresses in it's implementation than there are answers.
At a cost of a 5.9 million dollars with the Rhode Island Judiciary we can only hope that this will be a good advancement for the court and the citizens of our state.